| Zathura | |
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Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Jon Favreau |
| Produced by | Michael De Luca Scott Kroopf William Teitler Peter Billingsley |
| Screenplay by | David Koepp John Kamps |
| Based on | Zathura by Chris Van Allsburg |
| Starring | Josh Hutcherson Jonah Bobo Dax Shepard Kristen Stewart Tim Robbins |
| Music by | John Debney |
| Cinematography | Guillermo Navarro |
| Editing by | Dan Lebental |
| Studio | Radar Pictures |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
| Release date(s) | November 11, 2005 |
| Running time | 113 minutes 102 minutes (DVD cut) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $65 million |
| Box office | $64,321,501 |
Zathura: A Space Adventure (or just Zathura) is a 2005 fantasy science fiction film directed by Jon Favreau, and is loosely based on the illustrated book Zathura by Chris Van Allsburg, author of Jumanji. It stars Jonah Bobo as Danny and Josh Hutcherson as Walter. Tim Robbins also had a small role as the boys' divorced father. The film was shot in Los Angeles and Culver City, California & was released on November 11, 2005 by Columbia Pictures.[1] Unlike the book, the film contains no Jumanji material and does not mention any Jumanji events. The film was a critical success despite being a box office bomb.
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Brothers Walter (Josh Hutcherson) and Danny (Jonah Bobo) can never seem to get along with each other, or with their older sister, Lisa (Kristen Stewart). One day, when their father sets off for work, they quarrel yet again while Lisa is in her bedroom upstairs. Danny is banished into the house's basement by older brother Walter for hitting him in the face with a baseball. There he discovers a clockwork-driven space-themed board game called "Zathura". It is a race game, and the objective is to reach a space location called Zathura. At each turn, one of its two markers moves along or back on its track, and the game issues a card (all of which are read primarily by Walter, as Danny cannot read properly) of which the effects happen immediately (similar to the clues of Jumanji). The boys start playing the game. On looking out, one of them sees that it has become night, and that the house is no longer on Earth but on a small rock floating in space. According to the instructions, the house will not return to Earth until the game is finished. During the story, the brothers must overcome their ill will toward one another to survive.
Danny and Walter try to tell Lisa, who is in bed, about what happened, but she believes that it is nighttime and refuses to believe the two. When Danny takes his next turn, they receive a card saying that Lisa is frozen in cryonic sleep, leaving the two brothers to fend for themselves. When Walter takes a turn, a toy-sized robot is brought into existance, but grows larger and becomes programmed to attack him. After being chased through the house, the robot becomes disabled falling into the basement as the house falls into the gravitational field of a star. Unexplainedly, the house stops falling into that star. When Danny takes another turn, Zorgons, which are lizard-like aliens, appear in a ship from nowhere and attack the house. Amid the chaos, Walter receives a 'Reprogram' card (which he tries to use on the Zorgons to no effect), and Danny receives a card "Rescue stranded astronaut"; an astronaut appears and must be rescued. The astronaut helps the two to get rid of the Zorgons by turning off all heat in the house, as the Zorgons' vision is thermal and therefore can only see heat signatures. The astronaut sets a couch on fire and pushes it into space; the Zorgons leave and follow it. The astronaut tells them of the dangers of Zorgons, and telling them that they travel the universe to find heat. After an argument, Danny allows the astronaut to stay to help the two through the rest of the game, much to Walter's disappointment.
Returning to the game, Walter notices Danny has illegally moved his piece forward and accuse him of cheating; he forcibly moves it back while berating Danny, resulting in two arguments one before the move and another after that. The game interprets only Walter's action as cheating and the game punishes him by getting him sucked out into space, but he is rescued by the astronaut, who has a jetpack. The incident increases the tensions between the two brothers. When Walter takes another turn, he receives a '"Shooting star, make a wish as it passes"' card, and following yet another argument instigated by the card an Danny throwing the game down in anger, Walter wishes for a football signed by Brett Favre. Having feared that Walter wished for Danny to not exist, the Astronaut tells the two that he played the game with his brother many years ago, and him and his brother also despised each other. The astronaut received a "Shooting star, make a wish as it passes" card, and wished for his brother to never be born, therefore leaving him stuck in the game. This story prompts both Danny and Walter to reconcile, and the Astronaut promises to protect the two from any future threats in the game.
By now, Lisa has come out of her cryonic stasis. The boys and the astronaut do not see her turning up the thermostat to heat the house because she felt cold, and the resulting heat and light draw Zorgon ships back. The Zorgons shoot at the house, further damaging it, and anchor to it with grapples, and suck the game into their ship along with miscellaneous house debris, which they shovel into their ship's engine in order to use them as fuel. Lisa, now knowing what has happened, joins the trio. Danny, Walter, Lisa, and the Astronaut take refuge in a small room in the upstairs of the house, at the point that safest area in the house as the Zorgons boarded the house in the basement. Walter heads downstairs to try to retrieve the game, but is forced to return upstairs in vain. Danny reluctantly decides to retrieve the game by heading down the basement via a dumbwaiter, which is large enough for him to fit into, and riskily through a boarding passage into the Zorgon ship where he frees a group of four-eyed goats to distract one of the Zorgons. He rescues the game at the last moment before it would have been shoveled into a furnace. Meanwhile, a Zorgon arrives upstairs to inspect that part of the house, and at the same time, a Zorgon spots Danny getting into the dumbwaiter. The Zorgon alerts the others and a group of them attacks Danny as he tries to head upstairs. Danny is rescued by Walter, but the two are surrounded on the stairway by Zorgons.
The robot, having revived, tries to attack the boys. Walter uses the "Reprogram" card (which he had drawn earlier) on the robot, which then attacks the Zorgons. Of the two Zorgon spaceships, one flees, and another explodes. One Zorgon survives the robot's kamikaze attack and sneaks up behind Walter and Danny as they are wondering where Lisa is. Before the Zorgon can kill them, Lisa crushes and kills it by shoving Danny's piano down on it. Walter, drawing another "Shooting star, make a wish as it passes" card, wishes that the astronaut had his brother back. A copy of Danny appears. The astronaut apologizes to the copy of Danny, who appears to be his brother. It is revealed that the astronaut and his brother are Walter and Danny from an alternate timeline which started when Walter at the first wish card wished otherwise: "I wish my brother had never been born." The astronaut's brother disintegrates into sparks which enter Danny when the two touch. The astronaut thanks Walter and tells him to take care of Danny, then touches him and turns into a copy of Walter, which smiles at him and disintegrates into sparks which enter Walter. Thus the two time lines merge, and the future caused by Walter wishing Danny away is erased. Lisa is alarmed to find that she had fallen for an older version of her brother, Walter.
In the last throw of the game, the Zorgons, who are now on the warpath against the humans, return with a large fleet, and start blasting the house. Danny scores a move which brings his marker to Zathura, and the Zorgons stop firing. Zathura turns out to be a black hole, which sucks up the Zorgons along with the house, Lisa and Walter. Moments later, the house is back on Earth, whose structure and furnishings are as they were before the game began and in perfect condition. As their mother arrives to take them to her house, Lisa orders them to never speak of what happened but as they leave, Walter's bike which appeared floating in space several times drops onto the lawn.
Director Jon Favreau preferred to use practical effects instead of CGI in the film. "...it's so fun to actually shoot real spaceships or have a real robot running around on the set, or real Zorgons built by Stan Winston. It gives the actors, especially young actors, so much to work off of," he said.[2] Dax Shepard, who plays the astronaut in the film, said that he would not have been interested in doing the film if the effects had been "CGI based".[3] Actress Kristen Stewart enjoyed the on-set effects, saying that, "When we harpooned walls and ripped them out, we were really doing it. When there was a fire on set, there was really fire," and that, "The only green screen I was ever involved with was for getting sucked out into the black hole."[4] Miniature models were used to create the spaceships, and Favreau enjoyed going back to techniques used in many earlier films such as the original Star Wars trilogy.[5] However, in some shots the Zorgon ships were computer-generated, and digital effects were used in many other shots, such as to create meteors and planets, to add computer-generated legs and arms to the robot suit built by Stan Winston Studios, to digitally augment the Zorgon suits (which were constructed so that the head came out of the front of the suit where the actor's chest was and the actor wore a blue screen hood over his own head), and to create an entirely computer-generated Zorgon for one shot.[6] According to Pete Travers, Visual Effects Supervisor on the film for Sony Pictures Imageworks, retaining the stylized "1950s sci-fi look" from Van Allsburg's book "was a very important aspect of the effects".[7]
Favreau discouraged the notion that the film is a sequel to the earlier Jumanji, having not particularly liked that film. Both he and author Chris Van Allsburg (who also wrote the book of the same name upon which Jumanji is based) stated that Zathura is very different from Jumanji.[8]
The soundtrack to the film is an original score by John Debney and is available on CD.[9]
The studio hyped the release of Zathura in an attempt to generate word of mouth, with tie-ins including an episode of The Apprentice showcasing its family appeal.
The film received mostly positive reviews from critics; it currently holds a 76% "Certified Fresh" approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.[10]
It was considered a flop due to its $13,427,872 opening weekend gross, ranking only #2 for the weekend, far behind Disney's Chicken Little. Even worse, it lost 62% of its audience the next weekend, due to the significant opening of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It ended up grossing just $29,258,869, less than half of its $65 million budget. The international box office total was $35,062,632, for a total of $64,321,501 worldwide, just under the film's budget. The plot's similarities with Jumanji proved to be its undoing, with one observer referring to it as "Jumanji in space without Robin Williams".[11]
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