Zathura

Saw Zathura, a strange, space-themed Jumanji rip-off (although to be fair, it's also based on a Chris Van Allsburg book, so "rip-off" is probably too strong a term.) Anyway, I had low hopes going in.  Like Jumanji, I just hoped this would be fun and episodic - the main character kids dealing with each little challenge as their house crumbles around them.  Since this is space-themed, I expected them to ultimately be playing on a little scrap of floorboard, floating in space, perhaps a whimsical lamp to keep them company.

The film is pretty much that.  Each little challenge is dealt with as the next one arrives.  There's a lot of Buck Rogers ray gun iconography, but this is a modern kid-friendly comedy, so everyone has to act laconic and eye-rollingly bored and arch and sarcastic.  This is a little sad, but that's kid's movies for you.  The Zathura game is a great prop however.  The pressed-tin tech looks great and is a neat aesthetic to explore, rather than the by-now-trite clockwork or the carved wood of the original Jumanji.

The central conflict of the film, apart from the whizzing meteors and such, is the rocky relationship between the two brothers, who fight and scream and wish that the other had never been born.  It's fairly sad stuff, more-so for being broadly played.  The older brother is supposed to be a sort of jock bro but he comes off as cruel and aggressive.  The younger boy is clearly the protagonist, and he's supposed to be aggravating, but once again the director can't bring himself to actually make the kid aggravating, so instead everyone else comes off as mean to this poor little moppet.

There's also something near the end that happens that I thought was very weird.  It feels spoiler-y to me so highlight if you're interested: One character turns out to be another one from another dimension or a different timeline or something.  It's fairly confusing to me.  Nothing else that high-concept happens in the movie - it's all Buck Rogers whiz-bang.  I guess the reality-warping game itself could compare, but one thing at a time you know?  It feels like a hat on a hat.

So anyway, the film is exactly what it looks like: an inferior duplicate of Jumanji which was itself not an amazing film.  I have huge nostalgia for it (Jumanji) but that wasn't quite enough to carry me through this film.  It's not terrible and I enjoyed it alright, but it was a little tedious.