Ryer climbs into the chair, and Transplanted TAMI starts the countdown to the jump. And it seems the emergency generators will have enough power to run the particle accelerator. Hey, why not?

The Baboonosauri are almost through the doors, and if that's not bad enough, the last time wave is sweeping through the city. Just as the countdown reaches zero, the Baboonosauri finally break through the doors—Although, they aren't actually shown doing so. The doors just sort of fly open by themselves. Maybe they were supposed to add the creatures in post-production.

"The university" also has a waterbed in their nuclear reactor core.

Gird your loins for the second stupidest thing in the entire movie. The last time wave sweeps through, causing even more vegetation to appear. Note, however, that the city is still filled with buildings. You know, buildings built by humans. Humans that have now officially been erased from the timeline. Never existed; an evolutionary dead-end. So where did the buildings come from, huh? Aaarrrgh!

It gets worse. The camera pans away from the particle accelerator (built by humans, dammit!) and over toward the computer console where Dr. Rand was sitting a moment ago.

In her place, still touching the controls of the machine, is... a walking catfish.

Nothing at all like the catfish... but it's beautiful!

Holy frijoles, are you kidding me? Are they really implying that the changes in the course of evolution resulted in Dr. Rand ending up a catfish creature instead of a human being? Has every human on earth been replaced, on a one-for-one basis, by corresponding fish beings? Can you hear Darwin spinning?

In a movie about evolutionary chaos, I might buy an alternate race of walking fish becoming the predominant species, but in no way will I accept that individual humans are simply morphed into corresponding fish creatures. Would somebody in Hollywood please look up the word "evolution" in the dictionary? Please take note that evolution works on populations, not individuals!

Thank God that fish-Rand and fish-Ryer didn't mate and produce babies. That would have been entirely too stupid to bear. No one could go that far into nuttsville!

Oh, crap.

Scientific ire aside, and in all seriousness: who built Chicago in this alternate timeline? The fish people? If so, why did they build it to suck? For a single example, drawn from an infinite list of possibilities: Why would the fish people build a university, with a particle accelerator that does not currently, nor could it ever, work?!?!?

Sigh. I don't mean to yell. I just need to step away from this movie for a while, before I grind my teeth into powder. I'll be back. I'm going to go watch something more scientifically plausible. Like Plan 9.

I'm back. Feeling better. Ready to make it through the rest of the movie now, I think. Now that Ryer's jumping back in time, the actual resolution of this whole mess should be much easier to sit through than the painful stretch that led up to this point. That's what I'm hoping, anyway. Please, let it be so.

Before she became a catfish creature, Dr. Rand told Ryer that he would "slingshot" on this jump. That is, he would go back to one year before the time of the hunt, for a fraction of a nanosecond, and then zip back forward to the hunt. When he actually jumps, that does indeed happen, except he spends ten seconds here, peering out into the jungle through a time-portal-hole. While the screenwriters are out looking up the word "evolution", perhaps they can look up "nanosecond" as well.

Ryer finally slingshots forward to the time of the hunt. We know it's the time of the hunt because the path is there, and he can hear the Allosaurus roaring in the distance. Ryer has been thoughtfully placed by the neo-TAMI on the end of the path that Eckles and Middleton use to run away from the dinosaur. They both run right past him, not seeming to care too much that the person they just passed is bi-locating.

Ryer doesn't stop to help them, however. Instead, he continues on around the corner toward the rest of the hunting party. He finds the party, including the other Ryer, all "engaged" with the dinosaur at the moment. Since this is a replay of the earlier hunt, everyone except Ryer is just standing there, watching the Allosaurus.

New Ryer calls out to Jenny—Yay! Jenny's back! Jenny's back!—and she looks up at him. Then she looks over at Old Ryer, and back once more to New Ryer. New Ryer tells Jenny she has to get him on the holo-disc, and he uses a few seconds to spill the beans about Hatton and Derris shutting off the bio-filter. He then tells her to give the holo-disc to him when they get back to the future.

Having figured out how to keep future time travel accidents from happening in the future, New Ryer pops back around the corner to deal with Eckles and Middleton. Good thing Middleton didn't step off the path until after Ryer was done with his little speech, isn't it?

Ryer sees Middleton stumbling along the path, dangerously close to the edge. The butterfly to be squished flutters into view, right down near Middleton's boots. Ryer runs up, slides face-first down the path, and pulls Middleton to the ground just as he was about to step off the path.

Answer me this, oh movie: Why couldn't someone squish a bug while still staying on the path? Is there some device that keeps bugs from flying low over the path? Or prevents crawling things from crawling on the path? Hmm? Bulletproof procedures, my ass.

Middleton gets freaked out by Ryer tackling him, and screams. But since the timeline is now fixed, New Ryer vanishes, leaving Middleton looking mildly perplexed. That's the moment when I would have screamed, but maybe that's just me. Eckles goes running back towards the rest of the hunters, so Middleton gets up and follows.

The rest of the scene is pretty much a replay of the first Middleton/Eckles hunt, as it should be. But there are a couple of differences. The first difference is that Jenny looks at Ryer with a knowing smile, clutching the holo-disc she'll presumably give him after the jump. Ryer, of course, doesn't have a clue, so Jenny just walks away. The second difference comes when Ryer asks Middleton and Eckles what happened, and Middleton responds with "Don't you know?"

Here's what I don't get: If Ryer was able to jump back and meet the original hunting party, that means there were two Ryers in one place at one time. So why doesn't the hunting party run into their past selves every time they jump back? After all, they established that they always return to the same point in time. Shouldn't the path be pretty crowded right now, with the Wallenbecks, Middleton, Eckles, the Chinese guys, and everyone else that ever went on a Time Safari jump? Sorry, more meta-idiocy. That'll be the last time, I promise.

Finally, as everyone heads back towards the portal, Jenny pulls Agent Derris aside and tells him that she knows about the bio-filter. In a movie where the actors were allowed to, well, act, Derris would look concerned. Here, he looks like he's wondering where he left his keys.

On the way back to the portal, the un-squished butterfly flaps by Jenny, and she watches it pass, transfixed. I hope they're not implying that she knows it was a squashed butterfly that changed the course of history, because there's no possible way she could know that. New Ryer wasn't specific at all about what went wrong. The problem could have just as easily been Middleton humping a velociraptor for all she knows.

Hey, that would explain the Baboonosauri, so just maybe... Nah. PG-13.

Back in 2055, everything seems to be back to normal. Hatton is there, applauding the returning hunters like he always does. This scene also plays out much like the original, but this time Agent Derris whispers to Hatton that the jig is up in regards to the bio-filter.

After everyone has dispersed to their respective corners of the facility, Jenny pulls Ryer off to the side. Safely out of earshot of everyone else, she hands Ryer the spherical holo-disc, and tells him that he's on it. Two of him, to be exact. She kisses him on the cheek (Noooo, Jenny! Why would you come back from the dead just to break my heart like that?) and tells him to take the recording and scram.

Jenny, you're going to get splinters in your lips if you keep doing that.

In the next scene, Ryer is once again in a cab, headed for Dr. Rand's impossibly sweet suite. But this time when he enters the building, the elevator is in fine working order. At Dr. Rand's door, Ryer isn't greeted with a shotgun in the face. Instead, Rand tells him to go away, saying she's tired of fighting. But Ryer manages to talk his way inside anyway.

Once inside, Rand tells Ryer to make himself useful, and throw a bag of fertilizer on the rhododendron. Okay, first, there is no bag of fertilizer that we can see. Secondly, here's Ryer's response: "The white ones." I guess the screenwriters forgot that this Ryer hasn't been here yet, and doesn't know what a rhododendron is. That's the most charitable explanation, I'm afraid. The only other possibility is that this Ryer somehow has the knowledge of the other Ryer. If that's the case, why doesn't Rand remember being a fish lady? Why doesn't Jenny remember being eaten by a snake? Stupid, stupid, stupid movie.

Ryer manages to convince Rand that she should look at his holo-disc, saying that everything she's been warning people about has in fact come to pass. She tries to maintain her bitchiness for a while, but finally succumbs. She walks back through the vast apartment, and offers Ryer a cup of coffee.

And that, dear readers, is the end of the movie. The camera zooms back to the fully repaired Chicago skyline, with the tower of Barad-dur restored to its gleaming, frightening, omnipresent glory. Roll credits.

Now, having suffered through the pain that is the film version of A Sound of Thunder, let's take a quick look at the source material. Bradbury's short story is indeed short: less than 5,000 words, in fact. The movie runs 110 minutes, which tells you right there that the story could have only provided the basic skeleton for the script. And we've already been over how the "meat" added to the skeleton is largely gangrenous stupidity.

In the story, only one jump is presented, instead of three as in the movie. So the one in the story is obviously the one where things go wrong. In the story, the main customer is "Eckels", the leader of the safari is Mr. Travis, and there is no Middleton.

The rest of the Time Safari crew from the movie, from Hatton on down, also are not in the story. There are some other peripheral staff members and customers, but they aren't really important to the story. The whole "no wild animals on Earth" plot line in the movie is thankfully missing from the story. Here, Eckels is a wealthy man, who's hunted big game all over the world. Now, he wants to give himself the ultimate hunting thrill.

The time machine is more felt than described in the story, and it certainly doesn't involve particle beams, dry ice fog, or roller coaster restraints. In fact, it seems to be big enough to lounge around in, and the trip takes long enough that preparations for the hunt can be made inside the machine.

There's still a path that the hunters must stay on, but the hunt is for a Tyrannosaurus Rex, rather than an Allosaur. The path is floating "anti-gravity metal", instead of the shimmering, force-field-like path in the movie. Travis explains the rules to Eckels in much the same terms as in the movie, and they again boil down to "stay on the path".

The hunters are equipped with normal rifles, that fire normal bullets, and there isn't any safety system preventing them from firing. It's also not a given that the rifles will kill the T. Rex; the hunters have to be careful to shoot the beast in the brain.

The Eckels in the story panics even more than the one in the movie, once he's confronted with the dinosaur. He freezes and is unable to shoot, so Travis orders him back to the time machine. It's here that Eckels steps off the path. The other two customers are able to hold it together long enough to help kill the beast, but after it's dead, they both collapse to their knees and throw up. And the party is wearing helmets, like they were in the movie, so—yuck. Bradbury doesn't tell us how they manage not to aspirate their own vomit, however.

As punishment for panicking, and for stepping off the path, Travis forces Eckels to dig the bullets out of the dinosaur corpse with a knife before they head back to their own time. Eckels manages to do so, just barely. There isn't any mention of a "bio-filter" in the story, but the party does clean up and change clothes in the time machine during the trip back.

In the story, the changes caused by the time travel accident are far more subtle that they are in the movie. When Eckels and Travis return from the past, they already know Eckels stepped off the path, but they don't know yet that he stepped on a butterfly. Upon their return, Eckels can sense that something isn't quite right. Everything is subtly, almost imperceptibly changed. More obviously, the spelling on the Time Safari sign is a bit unusual:

Does this mean that Cherokee Jack is really the product of a time travel accident?

Seeing the sign causes Eckels to check his boots, whereupon he discovers the dead butterfly.

They learn that the biggest change to the timeline is the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. Prior to the accident, "Keith" became president, defeating "Deutscher". It's implied that the election was close, which is weird, because Deutscher is described as "an anti everything man for you, a militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual." His election would have led to the "worst kind of dictatorship". After the accident, it's Deutscher that's elected, instead of the "fool weakling Keith".

At the end of the story, there is a "sound of thunder", which is Travis' rifle going off. We're not told who he shot, but the assumption is Eckels. There's no attempt to repair the timeline in the story, and thank God, nobody changes into a fish.

I like Ray Bradbury, but this story isn't perfect. To me, it's the same sort of "tin ear" dialogue that the movie version occasionally exhibits, although it is more excusable in literature than in a movie.

But fundamentally, the story shares the same core "idiot plot" flaw that the movie has. The core commandment of time travel, in both story and movie, is "don't step off the path". So the idiocy here can be summed up in two words: safety railing. Or lack thereof, actually.

If stepping off the path is so disastrous, then why not put a railing on the path to prevent people from actually stepping off? If nobody thought of that, then they deserve a fascist president, or to be turned into catfish people.