Movie Review: “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle”
January 16, 2018
If you are avoiding theaters because of a sequel that most people never expected, don’t be. This is not a poorly directed recreation of your childhood. Instead, get ready to see a lighthearted, action-packed movie that will update the game of your dreams (or nightmares) and play off of your nostalgia.
If you’ve never seen the original 1995 “Jumanji,” here is a brief summary. Jumanji is a board game that lures kids in with the sound of rhythmic drums. Young Sarah Whittle and Alan Parish find the board game and decide to play it one night. After a few fateful rolls, they realize too late that the game is all too real. Live bats invade the house and Alan is sucked into the board game. Years past and two more children find the game, this time siblings by the names of Judy and Peter. They begin playing, and one of them releases Alan Parish from the game, only he is now a full grown man (played by the late Robin Williams). The rolls of terror continue, and the only way for everything to go back to normal is to find Sarah Whittle and win the game.
“Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” takes a new approach to the classic game. Instead of the board game we all know and “love,” it becomes a video game because “Who plays board games anymore?” and the rhythmic drums draw a new victim in. Fast forward twenty years to the era of hashtags and Snapchat filters, and you have four very different students who all get detention on the same day. Instead of taking the staples out of old magazines like they were meant to do, they find an old video game, “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.” The young teens boot up the game, select their characters, and then realize something is very wrong when the sound of drums fill their ears, louder and more intense than ever before.
One by one, they’re sucked into Jumanji, a completely unfamiliar wilderness filled with dangerous creatures and suspicious circumstances. You can imagine that young Alan Parish had a tough time surviving this wilderness when he entered the jungle alone, but he managed.
The goal of the game: save Jumanji. Each child landed in this foreign world in the body of their chosen avatar, an avatar that turned their weaknesses into strengths and/or made their previous strengths unheard of. They had to work together and grow as people to survive and win.
Loading ...The video game aspect of the movie was extremely well done. NPCs were always repeating their instructions and only answering their programmed responses. Players were able to see and read off their stats. The levels got tougher as their lives got fewer. Player deaths took some liberty for comedic and dramatic effect, but it never caused more than an eye roll.
So when you watch this adventure and comedy-packed movie, be on the lookout for the tiny sprinkles of nostalgia that appear in the game, and enjoy the fact that the scrawny and nerdy boy became The Rock because it sure is entertaining to see him scream in fear.
