So…Jumanji is a videogame now? Okay, I’ll bite. There was a certain charm to Jumanji being a board game in the original film, but I can run with the update to suit modern times.
It seems like I should be excited about this on some level. We are decades removed from Tron, The Wizard, and The Last Starfighter, and films with videogames as the central premise (not to be confused with movies based on video games like Resident Evil) are few and far between.
While the aforementioned three are practically cult classics in their own right, they were released literally over 30 years ago, and the only comparable movie we have now is Happy Madison’s Pixels. Depending on who you ask, that’s either a good thing (it made a TON of money) or bad (it reinforced negative gamer stereotypes while doing so).
I’ll choose to look at the fact that Jumanji went from being a board game in the original film, to an old-school videogame in the upcoming remake, as a nod to Pixels. The argument could be made that its financial success provided studios with the confidence to greenlight another movie with a similar slant.
So here, a group of ragtag archtypes get sucked into an Atari (sporting a character select screen so high-res it should be frying the console), and on the way through get turned into Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Karen Gillan. Empowered in appearance alone, off they go to survive the dangers of the jungle with their personalities intact nevertheless.
I could go on for days about the accurate representation of games in movies, but I’ll take the win, and move on to other matters. What bothers me more is just how this particular premise potentially sucks all of the excitement out of the trailer, and what Jumanji should be about.
By turning the characters into avatars instead of simply being themselves, or by transporting them into the world instead of bringing the world to them, the stakes are drastically lowered. For anyone young enough to remember the original, or has seen it recently with the power of cable or VOD, I think we can all agree that the original Jumanji is terrifying.
The premise of a board game injecting deadly creatures and life-or-death situations into the real world was to say the least, an intriguing one, and the original was made in the 90’s when we cared far less about people’s feelings. Between monkeys throwing deadly knives with precision, to man-eating plants, to a hunter who literally sought the kids out like game, and mosquitos so deadly they could pierce through car windshields, there was more than enough nightmare fuel to scar me, and anyone else well into their teens. It was precisely what made the movie so engaging–You knew it wasn’t real, your brain knew it was a movie, but heavens, it was executed so well, you actually felt the danger and wanted to see these kids make it out alive.
A cartoon that so far, seems to only affect our main characters, so there’s no greater implication behind just what they’ve gotten themselves into. What should I be rooting for? Survival? They aren’t kids anymore, they’re musclebound adventurers who act like kids. If they die in the game, they’re simply dead, and because they’ve been sucked into a console, to the rest of the world, it’ll be as if they all simply went missing. Who will even know?
I get that Hollywood doesn’t trust children enough to scare the bejeezus out of them anymore, but the end result is that of a movie that at present, just looks like it’s been transformed into a bit of a corny action film. I feel like I’ve literally stepped back in time, and not just in terms of it being Jumanji, or the ripe presence of an Atari pushing the “old school” messaging hard. I mean in the sense that this trailer could’ve worked similarly if they’d just up and called it The Rundown 2, or Journey 3, and no one would’ve batted an eyelash. I mean, it literally has the look and feel of the kinds of movies Dwayne Johnson did when he was still being credited as “The Rock”.
Maybe I’ll be wrong in the end. After all, this is only a trailer. Maybe it’ll get better with more footage and context. Maybe, someone will knock the console over, and the craziness of the game will spill into the real world in a blockbuster finale. Or, perhaps, maybe they’ll find the bones of others inside the cartridge, and the focus will instead shift to a malevolent child-eating-console of doom. I’m not convinced these things will happen, given this trailer. I might be giving them too much credit, and may have put more thought into it than they did.
Perhaps, like the end of the original movie, it would’ve been better to leave this buried.
