A Sound of Thunder
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318081https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder_(film)A Ray Bradbury adaptation starring Edward Burns and Ben Kingsley.
> The film was originally going to be directed by Renny Harlin, star Pierce Brosnan in the main role, and be shot in Montreal, Canada. The budget was meant to be $55 million.
> Filming was to have begun in Montreal on 16 April 2001. Brosnan wanted a rewrite of the script. However, the filmmakers did not have time to rewrite and finish the film by July 1, which is when Hollywood writers and actors were poised to go on strike. Matters were complicated when Canadian producer Nicolas Claremont died in April 2001.
> By November 2001 Harlin had been replaced by Peter Hyams. Brosnan left the project as well and was replaced by Edward Burns.
> After Franchise Pictures went bankrupt during post-production, the remaining backers provided only $30 million to work with, out of the $80 million originally allocated. Previsualization software was used.
> The film was largely panned by both critics and audiences alike. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 6% score based on 98 reviews, with an average rating of 2.8/10. The site's consensus states: "Choppy logic and uneven performances are overshadowed by not-so-special effects that makes the suspension of disbelief a nearly impossible task." Common criticisms against the film included its poor special effects, uninvolved performances, scientific errors and Ben Kingsley's hair. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of "D−" on scale of A+ to F.
> James Duffy of The Boston Globe stated "The combination of awful special effects and mediocre acting created this catastrophe," and it included the film in its list of "Bomb at the box office". Roger Ebert stated that while he "cannot endorse it, [he] can appreciate it" as a film that is bad because it "want[s] so much to be terrific that [it] explode[s] under the strain."
> At the 2005 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards, the film was nominated for Worst Director, Worst Supporting Actor (Kingsley), Most Intrusive Musical Score, and Least "Special" Special Effects, but it won none of those awards.
> Shooting took place in the Czech Republic in 2002. The unit was affected by the August 2002 floods.
> Kingsley said "I was allowed to give a very ironic comedic performance. I was able to make my director (Peter Hyams) stifle a huge amount of laughter behind the camera."
> Director Peter Hyams said the effects were done "in a mom-and-pop fashion. That's the only way we could make this film for a reasonable amount of money. We had stuff done in Germany, Hong Kong, India. We've also taken a long time to get it all completed. The post-production on this film will be over two years by the time we're finished. I myself will have worked on it for three years."
> Hyams' son John later said "it was one of the hardest experiences of his [father's] career. You know, it's got to be a real sinking feeling going into something shooting all of it against green screen with all this trust that you're relying on this whole element, this whole technology that ultimately you're not going to be able to afford and you have to do it anyway."
I'm halfway through. It's not nearly as bad as that makes it sound.
It looks to me like the big problem is context. It had cheesy dinosaurs 12 years after Jurassic Park had changed the game, culture didn't have the taste for a campy Starship Troopers style fun scifi blaster adventure. The $50 million below intended budget meant that all that was filmed on green screen for a big budget movie suffered the post production results of a low budget one.
The set construction is solid though, the story is good, and I'm actually finding disbelief easy to suspend, because it isn't trying to be heady accurate scientific intellectualism so much as fun. The acting is above average, Kingsley is great. There are interesting commentaries on profit motive and technological advancement, the ending is not obvious to me. It employs minimal low-IQ devices and cheap tropes. A few scenes capture situations I've not seen in any other movie.
Side note: In conversations between the main character and his computer, this movie predicts the behavior of AI models very accurately.
I propose a team of AI video enthusiasts use this as a proof of concept and rework the special effects. Much of it would be straightforward scenes where the foreground is professionally shot, but the background is amateur hour. Scenes where the model of the monster is okay - but needs higher resolution touchups. The physical sets are good enough as is and were really done well for its time. I think the challenge will be the smoothness of the monster movements, but who knows, maybe the tools will make it a breeze.
The result would not need to be a modernization that is meant to hold up to today's standards - but reworking it into a consistency that lets the good parts of this movie shine. The time that has passed has made it feel more like a blast from the past than the failed attempt at groundbreaking cinema that it must have felt like at the time.
Seems like the perfect specimen for a community remaster made cult classic showcase of what crowdsource tech + AI can do.
