Year 2055, Chicago. Technological
advances can permit time travel, and for multimillionaires, allow one to hire
Safaris to hunt dinosaurs. Only three simple rules: don’t forget anything
there, don’t bring anything from there and, above all, don’t change anything
from the past.
In this case, a mistake made by a couple
of silly clients produces the effect of the planet being shaken by temporal phenomena
that transform the city of Chicago into a futurist zoological park, leading the
viewer into a Jurassic Park type adventure directed by the experienced hand of
Peter Hyams (Capricorn
One, 1978, The Relic, 1997), who tries, unsuccessfully, to
conceal the main flaw of the movie: the amazingly seedy visual effects.
The 2002 flooding in Prague that
destroyed most of film’s sets, has something to do with this. The accident
caused an enormous delay in the production and, partially, explains the fact
that the film with a budget of $80 million, has a Sunday afternoon TV movie
look. The sets were replaced by digital backgrounds, with a questionable
quality, while the general design verges on the ridiculous, especially the
submarine sequences.
Originally, the film was to be shoot in Montreal in 2001, directed by Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, 1900, Exorcist: The Beginning, 2004) and starring Pierce Brosnan, but they abandoned the project. The veteran director Peter Hyams took the control and started the production without having all the financing. One of the film’s major financial partners, the German company QI Quality International GmbH & Co. KG, financially collapsed part way through production. Besides, Franchise Pictures, the major company production’s, (which we have already discussed here) viability was destroyed after the fraud sentence of the court in the case of the inflated budget of another memorable film, Battlefield Earth, falling into bankruptcy in 2004.
The other international production
companies (including US, Czech and German companies) decided to shoot the film
in the Czech Republic in 2002, where flooding destroyed the sets. Finally, the
opening had to be delayed more than a year after the originally release date.
The film earned a pitiful $1.1 million in USA, and $11 million worldwide,
getting merciless reviews that ridiculed it, causing it to go directly to
video-stores in many countries.
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