Dec 042005
 
two reels

When their father (Tim Robbins) has to work on a Saturday, peevish brothers Walter (Josh Hutcherson) and Danny (Jonah Bobo) play an old board game that Danny finds in the basement.  The game, Zathura, transfers their house to deep space, and each move tosses a new danger at them, including a malfunctioning robot and alien lizards.  To get home, they must finish the game.

Based on Chris Van Allsburg’s sequel to his award-winning picture book, Jumanji, Zathura does not claim to be a follow-up to the 1995 Robin Williams-Kirsten Dunst film of the earlier story.  That is the first of many mistakes.  Giving up the mantel of sequel, Zathura appears as a low budget remake.  Again we have a ’50s-style board game that create genre-style dangers on each turn.  Again there are the two siblings, the release of a previous player stuck in the game for years, and the destruction of the family house.  None of that’s bad, but it is awfully familiar.

Zathura is a claustrophobic, almost stage-bound picture, rarely departing from scenes of conversations within a few rooms of an old house, but when it does is when the movie sings.  Although the film is being sold on its emphasis on humanity over special effects, it is the effects that work.  A shot of a ringed planet, a clunky robot that flies through the wall of the house to return through another wall, a meteor shower, and an assortment of alien ships, are joyful, old-time space opera material created with modern technology.  This is Buck Rogers the way they couldn’t make it years ago.

But when not overwhelming with slick visuals (and booming sound), this is a remarkably drab affair.  Walter and Danny are annoying kids who might engender a parents’ love, but no one else’s, and it’s hard to imagine anyone being interested in their sibling rivalry.  With so much time spent on smashing you over the head with its message of “be nice to your brother,” it’s clear that Zathura is intended for young boys, but the filmmakers are out of touch with what young boys like.  No ten-year-old wants to watch two kids bicker about family issues while being interrupted on rare occasions by a killer robot.  He wants to watch the killer robot.  Cut ninety percent of the redundant squabbling, and all of Tim Robbins’ so-slow fatherly emotion jags, and put in more jokes and attacking monsters, and you’d have a nice family film.

At the pre-screening I attended, about half the audience was made up of families, and just like the lone adults, the children of those families were silent.  The only reactions came from parents, who were excited that a film was telling their kids to behave.  Of course the kids were just waiting for the next alien attack.