Zathura

Money Director Jon Favreau aims to please his Elf audience once again with the space adventure Zathura, a kind of Jumanji sequel, both based on books by Chris Van Allsburg who also wrote The Polar Express book. Does Favreau succeed? Yes, he does. Is it better than Jumanji? No, but is much cooler.

Once again the story is that of kids, two brothers (10 and 6) who spend their young lives fighting with each other over their father (Tim Robbins)'s attention, though all Danny (Jonah Bobo) really wants is to play games with his brother Walter (Josh Hutcherson) but him being the older, can't be seen playing with kids, or playing at all (I mean, he even has a girlfriend).
But they're left alone at the house one day, and after a fight that ends up with Danny getting locked in the creepy basement, they find a board game called Zathura. Danny immediately starts playing next to his brother and the adventure begins. A meteor shower hits the house, a old looking cool robot (kind of like the Sky Captain ones, and is voiced by Frank Oz!) attacks them, Alien lizards called Zorgons bomb the house from their spaceships, and yes, the house is floating in space too and there's no way to know where they are. During their are adventure, they are visited by a lost Astronaut (played by Dax Shepard) and later joined by their teenage sister Lisa, who's been upstairs in her room sleeping all day, and later cryogenized in the bathroom, thanks to the game. Lisa is played Kristen Stewart, the Panic Room kid now looking hot, though still young enough to put me in jail.

Comparing it with Jumanji, I have to say that there's a lot less comedy, but we can all agree that Shepard is no Robin Williams so that's ok. The kids were better before, especially in the acting department. You could see Kirsten Dust’s terror in her face and with her screams. There's not much of that here. I don't know what happened but with everything that was going on around them, it didn't look as if the kids knew that they could die any second. That would be the only negative point I could give the movie. Still, they did an awesome job at fighting like brothers really fight, to the point of getting annoying but that is totally credible, something that most movies with kids fail to accomplish.

There's great job by Favreau here. He used models instead of CGI and that shows, as everything looks incredibly realistic when they're in space. And besides all that cool stuff mentioned before, he adds some really nice touches like a Steve McQueen's Bullitt poster in Tim Robbins' studio. And the movie is sure to work great with kids and parents too, as it has some good hearted brotherly lessons to go along the amazing stuff they encounter in the adventure. Though I wish that Favreau would go back to make something more for adults (his next project is John Carter of Mars but that's geek stuff), I'm still happy with him doing this kind of movies, especially if they are as good as Zathura.