Zathura: A Space Adventure

What’s the Story?

Six-year-old Danny (Jonah Bobo) is feeling rather shut out by his older brother Walter (Josh Hutcherson), who in turn feels besieged by the demands of a sibling who dotes on him. Older and wiser and increasingly impatient, Walter just wants to be left alone, especially as he's also feeling abandoned by dad (Tim Robbins), working overtime to pay for two homes (he's recently divorced). The boys find distraction in "Zathura," a circa-'50s board game they found in the basement when dad goes to the office and leaves them in the care of their teenaged sister Lisa (Kristen Stewart). The game essentially turns their house into a space ship, floating through the starry sky somewhere near Saturn, buffeted by the occasional meteor shower or malevolent alien. Once they begin the game, the rules assert, Danny and Walter are unable to stop until they "finish," meaning that they need to find the reason they're playing, and, of course, reconcile with one another.

Is It Any Good?

ZATHURA: A SPACE ADVENTURE is a movie most likely to appeal to elementary-school boys. Like the game in Jumanji, another movie based on a children's book by Chris Van Allsburg (also the literary source for Polar Express), this one helps the siblings to work out their conflicts "metaphorically," here by encounters with hostile monsters, a deranged robot, and a "stranded astronaut" (Dax Shepard).

Their adventures are as episodic as the board game scenario suggests: each boy takes his turn. But as Jon Favreau's movie is most interested in the boys' relationship, Lisa is best described as plot device, convenient witness, and occasional instigator for their realizations and efforts. In this, she's aided by the astronaut, who shows up during Danny's turn (he's instructed to rescue this stranger and then attached to the astronaut, who identifies Danny as the one who "spun me"). This provides the younger boy with an eventual conflict, as the astronaut and Walter make different demands. Danny eventually comes to realize that Walter is his brother, no matter how ugly he's been to Danny in the past, and that makes him, as the astronaut observes, "all you have."