1606
Rotten Tomato: 75%
Common Sense Media: 3/5 stars
Roger Ebert: 3/4 stars
David stars: 3.5/5 davids
Box Office: $666.2 million
At first, when I saw the trailer, I knew I was going to love this movie. The movie stars in the film are Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Karen Gillan. The style of the movie was very fictional, like the main backbone of this movie, a video game. With the endless amount of adult humor and thrilling moments of Dr. Bravestone hanging over the helicopter, Jumanji is well-crafted movie which mixes in humor with the fictional living world. Jake Kasdan, the director of Jumanji, planned the whole movie to be amazingly satisfying. In certain scenes, such as the vast land of trees to a dark ominous road with torches that leads to the last level of the game, the cinematography played an important role in order to portray the childish, old-school video game.
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
Jumanji was first written as a children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg in 1981. Later on, in 1995, a movie came out in which Robin Williams escapes a board game pursued by monkeys, rhinos, elephants, and lions. The remake surrounds the life of four high school students who get sent to detention and are doing chores for the school. Later on, Spencer, a nerdy kid played by Alex Wolff, finds an old gaming device with the game “Jumanji” inside. As all students are bored from doing chores, the popular jock, Fridge (played by Ser’Darius Blain), joins in with him, and so does the Instagram-addicted queen bee Bethany (played by Madison Iseman). The final student, who is an introvert named Martha (played by Morgan Turner), is hesitant about going against what they are told to do, but with peer pressure, she joins in too.
The geeky Spencer chooses to play as the character Dr. Smolder Bravestone, an archeologist/explorer played by Dwayne Johnson. The popular jock chooses Franklin “Moose” Finbar, a zoologist/weapons-valet played by Kevin Hart. Martha chooses Ruby Roundhouse, a kungfu and dance-fighting master, played by Karen Gillan. Finally, and possibly the most satisfying of them all, the Instagram queen bee chooses the cartographer Professor Shelly Oberon, who is played by Jack Black. Each character represents in some way the players’ attributes such as how Spencer’s wimpiness can be seen in Dr. Bravestone, Fridge’s aggressive behavior in Franklin “Moose” Finbar, Martha’s uneasiness in Ruby Roundhouse and of course, the girly, Instagram queen Bethany in Professor Shelly Oberon.
The game consists of levels and lives with different scenarios that showcase each character’s power and weaknesses with humor. Each character has 3 lives. Professor Shelly is the first person to lose a life from a hippo in order to set the drama and seriousness of this game. Throughout the whole movie, comedy is presented in every way possible: dramatic comedy, accidental comedy, purposeful comedy, and aggressive comedy.
The main goal of the movie is to put back the green gem on top of the jaguar statue, which is where it came from. The four players run out of the horrifying hippo jungle and find an “NPC” (non-playable character) and are introduced to the whole game and its objectives. After finding out they have escaped the first level, the four players set foot towards the goal and begin the game. Later on in the movie, they find the long-lost player Alex (played by Nick Jonas) inside the game who is well known in the school of the four players. He thought he was stuck in the game for a couple of months but in reality, Alex was stuck in the game for 20 years. As the team joins together after finding Alex, they all enter the last stage of the game. As any last stage of any retro game, there is always a boss. The boss is a traveler looking for the green gem on top of a jaguar statue. The gem consists of powerful nature control, the ability to communicate and control all living thing in the jungle. As any good retro game, the five players have succeeded in putting back the green gem of nature and restore Jumanji to its original roots. After that, the narrator from the beginning comes back with his usual NPC voice lines and shakes the players’ hands in order to go back into the real world. As the four players go back to the real world, they have noticed Alex is not with them in the room. As the four players rescued Alex, time-shifted itself to a different dimension where Alex is alive, healthy, and has a family. Later on, the five meet with each other and Alex recalls the memories of the four other players who saved his life.
*END OF SPOILERS*
The characterization fits amazingly well with the actors that have been chosen and also the “real life” character combined together. For example, Dr. Bravestone is a masculine explorer with an attribute of wimpiness from Spencer, who is the real person controlling the character. Dwayne Johnson portrayed the nerdiness and the braveness together perfectly to represent the transformation of Spencer to an actual Dr. Bravestone in real life. The flow of the movie was not choppy at all. Editors, Mark Helfrich and Steve Edwards, made Jumanji as smooth as possible without missing certain details of the story while keeping the humor in tack. The characters are portrayed with the old-style gaming stats when it shows the characters strengths and weaknesses with a little of backstory. The strengths and weaknesses are read first but later on shown through physical actions. For example, “Moose” who has a weakness towards cake, ate some cake and later blew up into pieces. The way how Jake Kasden showcased each character was smart and unique. Adding the old school gaming styles to an old school game really adds the overall vibe of the dated movie atmosphere. The costumes for each character were great as well. It combines the use of old-school gaming clothes with modern standards. For example, Ruby Roundhouse is a kung-fu fighter and usually, kung-fu fighters are wearing these long, white robes with a colored belt, but in Jumanji, Ruby Roundhouse wears short tight cargo pants and a red crop top which is not fitting for a jungle environment. Ruby even said, “Why am I wearing half a shirt and short shorts in the JUNGLE?” Jumanji was filmed on the same island in Hawaii, which “The Planet of the Apes” films were filmed. The location was perfect for Jumanji due to the vast land of trees and trees. As a youngster who has never seen the first Jumanji movie, which was filmed in 1995, the soundtrack sounded amazing. With the mix of modern music and the old Jumanji soundtrack, both older and younger generations will enjoy the music being played.
Overall, the movie was hilarious with amazing passive-aggressive jokes, especially the ones made by Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson. Jumanji is a movie that brings the audience’s spirits up. The main moral of the story is that we all just get one life, even though in the movie, the characters have three, but in the real world, it’s only one life.
The Greatest Showman would have tried to make a song out of that, probably will go as:
You only get one life
Or maybe three
So go and ride your light
Into a tree
‘Cause you’ll come back again
And get eaten by a rhino
La-la-la albino.
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