ZATHURA: A SPACE ADVENTURE

By: Abbie Bernstein
Date: Friday, November 11, 2005

ZATHURA: A SPACE ADVENTURE is one of the better family and/or fantasy and/or science-fiction and/or just plain fun films to come along in a while. Springboarding from Chris Van Allsburg's slim picture book about a board game with a life of its own, writers David Koepp & John Kamps have come up with a plot that works wonderfully well, snappy dialogue, actually agreeable child characters and director Jon Favreau keeps the pace rocketing along.

Six-year-old Danny (Jonah Bobo) is desperate for attention from his 10-year-old brother Walter (Josh Hutcherson), who is in turn ferociously jealous of every moment they have with their divorced dad (Tim Robbins). When work requires Dad to leave the kids alone in his recently acquired but fairly old house (under the presumed supervision of their sleeping teenaged sister), Danny finds an old board game, "Zathura: A Space Adventure," with wind-up moving pieces and tries it out. The game immediately starts dictating reality and the house with Danny, Walter and sleeping sister (Kristen Stewart) inside it is suddenly somewhere in outer space. The only way to get home is to win the game but with asteroids, robots and carnivorous space creatures at every turn, not to mention continued sibling friction, this is going to be tough.

The opening of ZATHURA does a fast, fine job of setting up the family dynamics. The difference between this movie and several zillion others somewhat like it is that the characters talk like real, intelligent people, and the situation is presented in such a way that we have sympathy for all parties concerned, even when they're driving each other borderline crazy. The addition of a helpful astronaut (Dax Shepard) is an inspired development, especially given the way he ultimately works into the story.

Favreau visually and emotionally gets what's cool about the situation the shots of the house surrounded by stars, or of views out windows with planetary rings almost close enough to touch, have the magic of great fantasy book illustrations. Favreau also doesn't get overly sentimental on us there are touching moments, but we never feel slammed over the head with them and he never spends too long on the understandable freak-outs our heroes are amazed and sometimes terrified, but they keep going, and pretty quickly, too.

Bobo and Hutcherson have pleasing personalities and a good familiar vibe that makes them persuasive as brothers. Shepard is warmly laid-back as the visitor who comes to their aid, Stewart is funny without being shrill as the sister and Robbins comes across as a thoughtful and caring parent.

ZATHURA: A SPACE ADVENTURE improbably succeeds at creating and sustaining the mood elicited by children's adventure games and books wouldn't it be cool and scary and astounding if these things happened around us as we're reading and playing? Here, the answer is a definite, satisfying "Yes."