Zathura Reviews

Caldecott Medal-winning writer-illustrator Chris Van Allsburg's evocative Polar Express, Jumanji and Zathura (the latter two owe a great deal to Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat, in which bored youngsters preside over the destruction of an absent parent's home by anarchic id-monsters) are slim volumes whose bare-bones stories and rich, subtly detailed illustrations invite readers to expand and enrich what's on the page with their own imaginations. Leaving youngsters to their own creative devices isn't something the razzle-dazzle-'em school of mainstream children's movies encourages, and like the live-action JUMANJI (1995) and the creepily animated POLAR EXPRESS (2005), this noisy, nerve-shredding film is obvious and assiduously unmagical. Sulky, irritating 6-year-old Danny (wide-eyed Jonah Bobo, who has the misfortune to look like a living troll doll) and his bossy, self-important older brother, Walter (Josh Hutcherson), are home more or less alone — sister Lisa (Kristen Stewart) is upstairs sleeping the sleep of perpetually pissed-off teens — because their divorced dad (Tim Robbins), an advertising artist, is out replacing the client presentation Danny ruined while the brothers were raising hell in his home studio. Danny finds an old painted-tin space-adventure game called Zathura in the basement. Walter, on the verge of adolescence and supremely uninterested in baby games, refuses to play, but Danny starts the game anyway. Lo and behold, meteors start streaking through Dad's living room and the house pulls away from its foundation and floats into outer space, settling somewhere near Saturn's outer rings. Zathura may be a game, but it's not to be trifled with: The only way to get home is to play until the bitter end, which requires that the bickering brothers work together against such menaces as a killer robot and a zeppelin-shaped spaceship full of lizardlike Zorgons who eat little boys for breakfast. Lisa spends much of the adventure frozen in cryonic sleep, but they get some help from a slacker astronaut (Dax Shepard, one of the merry pranksters of TV's Punk'd) who's been trapped in the game for 15 years and knows a thing or two about how it works. The film's Buck Rogers-style graphics are cool, but the shrilly squabbling brothers — realistic though they may be — are insufferable, the story's your-turn/my-turn structure is tedious, and its relentlessly reiterated message about brotherly love and cooperation is really grating.