Starring Edward Burns and Ben Kingsley. Rated 14A. For showtimes, please see page 82

An otherwise profoundly unlucky bit of moviemaking that sat long in the distribution warehouse, A Sound of Thunder does hit a nerve right now with its eerily prescient view of nature and technology running afoul of each other in the not-too-distant future.

The film is about time travel gone wrong, but the most interesting bit of temporal tuggery takes us back to the Czech Republic of three years ago, when intense flooding and other snafus further complicated a shoot that had already weathered many a production storm. Among others, Renny Harlin and Pierce Brosnan were at some point slated to direct and star in this sci-fi tale, which was clearly intended to be a bigger-budget deal than what we ended up with. I mean, Peter Hyams you can understand; over the years, he did Capricorn One and Time Cop. But Edward Burns as an action hero? It's even worse than seeing the Brothers McMullen maker in romantic comedies, and that's saying something.

Burns, who confuses confidence with utter boredom, plays Travis Ryer, a scientist in the Chicago of 2055, where a millionaire called Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley, shamelessly overacting, and God bless him for it) has funded an enterprise that takes rich tourists back to prehistoric times to bag dinos before the swamps can get them. It's all planned out so that nothing can be carried between time zones, but you know how fallible those humans are. As per the Ray Bradbury story upon which this is loosely based, the flap of a butterfly's wings can make a powerful difference in the evolution of an entire planet.

After a dire warning from the program's designer (Braveheart's Catherine McCormack), things, of course, go terribly wrong, and a series of "time waves" hurtle across the planet, suddenly changing all the things that would be affected by major evolutionary shifts. The result, among other things, is a species of mandrills mixed with giant reptiles, and sea creatures that have rubber heads resembling what you would make in a modern f/x department.

Okay, this is where the movie needed more moolah. But after awhile, if one is so inclined, the viewer can enjoy Thunder's general cheesiness, which, right down to that awkward, pseudo-profound title, recalls the bigger-than-its-britches ambition of low-budget sci-fi flicks from the 1950s.

I enjoyed the costume design, which posits Chicago (played by Prague) as going through a nostalgia spurt for boxy suits of the Al Capone era, just as I snickered at a cast filled with non-Americans who only passingly hit their Yank-accent marks. Finally, though, you have to wonder why someone would want to make a time-travel movie in which the same place is visited four times. Too bad Hollywood's Golden Age wasn't on the itinerary.