I love time travel movies - although it's probably fairer to say I love the idea of time travel movies because I am usually frustrated at how they are so frequently poorly done. I don't expect the filmmakers to posit ground-breaking theorems that would realistically explain HOW time travel works, I just expect them to be logical and careful as they play in the arena. I was shocked I had missed this film - based as it is on the seminal Bradbury short story that explored (and coined) the butterfly effect of alterations in the past having repercussions in the future. But this film is a blandly soggy mess; seemingly the product of some serious over-development as a clever short story was forced into all the "hit film" boxes the producers could check off. Part Sci Fi, part Indiana Jones, part Jurassic Park; but what they left out of the equation were logic and intelligence. A little research turned up the production problems that resulted in the horrible digital effects (basically just pre-viz or old video game quality) so I won't trash them further (although in ANY world the actors painfully "fake-walking" in place while the green screen image scrolls behind them would be laughable) but the blatantly stupid way the whole butterfly effect is dealt with ("Time Waves will look cool!" someone must have said) and having first rate actors spew third rate dialogue does nothing but condemn the film to the heap of Time-Travel failures. I bet the director and actors wish they had a time machine so they could go back and reconsider their involvement with this.

This was a decent sci-fi movie, and I've seen quite a few time travel shows. (Small spoiler here) You have time tourists who are warned that the slightest interruption in the past can cause a cascade of disastrous repercussions in the future. Here, the changes in the evolution of nature don't come immediately but instead through a series of time waves. The acting and special effects were good too.This is certainly better than the effect in Ray Bradbury's original story "A Sound of Thunder", where stepping on a butterfly 65 million years ago only caused a change in the outcome of a Presidential election. Now that's too much of a stretch.My main problem with the movie, as a scientist, is that the movie completely overlooks the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. Any interference with the evolutionary time line the travelers made during the age of the dinosaurs would have been greatly impacted by their mass extinction around 65 million years ago. However, no mention is made in the movie of the effect the mass extinction could have had on ripple effect caused by the killing of the butterfly.

This is the type of film which gives the Science fiction genre/time travel sub-genre a bad name. Rich thrill-seekers pay a small fortune for a trip back in time to take part in a kind of Jurassic safari and in the killing of a dinosaur.Dressed like they are going paintballing they pass through a series of what looks like carbon dioxide fire extinguishers through a mysterious portal from the near future to millions of years into the primordial past to take down a very unconvincing plastic-looking dinosaur. What the excellent Ben Kingsley was doing in this movie I have no idea, must have paid well.The rest of the cast were for the most part clichéd, the spurned scientist cheated out of her fame and fortune as co-inventor of the time travel apparatus (clipped English, of course,this is Hollywood after all), the wooden hero safari leader and of course Ben Kingsley's sinister European accented right-hand man.Awful script, complete pseudo-science mixed with "waves of time" nonsense, and the effects were laughable, particularly the seal/human hybrid creature which appeared towards the end of the film and the poorly-animated futuristic vehicles and obvious model overhead monorail.Would not recommend.

I read before, that the CGI was bad. But I did not bother that much, since a good SciFi story can also be interesting to watch, when the CGI is cheap or not so prominent (also I can enjoy rather old SciFi films, when it is interesting -- like "Millennium" with laughable special effects for todays standard, but rather viewable and not so predictable story).BUT this film tries to hard to be a blockbuster with "big action" that it absolutely must disappoint. I hoped to get at least an interesting story. But as much as it fails to deliver "big action" it also fails to deliver a really interesting story. And further more, it does to much stealing of story elements from other films. I even was remembered of the "Triffids" ... and that is a bad signal. From that point on, the film got worse and worse.The film starts rather good (aside from the bad CGI, that really can put you of). Ben Kingsley was really good as the clever and reckless business man. The story unfolds rather interesting and the writing is not that bad (in the beginning). It contained some rather good humor, writing and acting. But after a while it gets lost in all that monster fights, that seam to say: Hey, we can't have a solution now -- the film must be at least 90 minutes ... and we have fired off all our good ideas in the first 25 minutes -- we now don't have an other idea than throwing yet another bunch of CGI on the actors.So, we come to the situation, that the SciFi film converts to a slasher video. We start out with seven or so actors ... and after 80 or so minutes one or two of them are left. This is so predictable.You see nothing, that was not done before (SciFi-wise, CGI-wise and Action-Wise) in better quality. Many ideas are plain copied. Also the base story was filmed at least once before.Also there are some really bad logical errors contained. The biggest one: The change in the past is coming in waves, but in the moment, the change is changed back, this change is coming immediately -- why?? But there are also worse logical errors and gaps contained which are not explained at all. I would also rather have a more elaborate ending and cut off one or two of those CGI fights which did not add to the story at all. So, the ending was the biggest disappointment ... also because of the big list of gaps and "illogicalities" it contains alone.To round it up: I had hoped to find a little more substance -- and even with rather good performances from some actors (Kingsley, Makatsch) all in all, the film can not satisfy, since so many older films provided more substance with similar stories (e.g. Millennium, Jurrasic Park, .....) The start of the film could have been an 6/10 -- but with the middle part and the weak ending, it is 4/10. The really interesting part are the first 25 minutes or so, after that it gets more and more predictable and the finish is to much clustered with story-gaps. Instead of an interesting twist (which I hoped for) they just "gap" the resolution out. The extremely weak ending alone costs the film at least one point in my voting.