Jumper - film review.
Jan. 18th, 2009 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tagrynHBO was unscrambled this weekend, so we managed to record some movies. One of those was Jumper, which we watched last night. Kinda "eh" about it - it wasn't walk-out-of-the-movie bad, but it had some critical problems that damaged what might have been a pretty decent movie.
* The movie is certainly easy on the eyes, with pretty people doing fun stuff. Samuel L. Jackson is solid, as always...and that leads in to my first problem. The main character, David (the "jumper" who can teleport from place to place, played by Hayden Christensen) is revealed early on to be a selfish, indulgent person, and he never really evolves from that throughout the movie. SLJ's character, a "Paladin" named Roland who is a member of an organization that hunts down and kills Jumpers, is supposed to be the bad guy, but he actually came across as more sympathetic than David. David robs banks and uses the money for his personal enjoyment while not bothering to help others (established very early in the story, albeit in an offhand way), while Roland is serving what he sees as a higher purpose of protecting the world from people like David who use their powers to exploit others. Roland's vicious, but he comes across as more sympathetic than David or the other major Jumper character, Griffin. In the end, there's nobody really left to root for, which is very anti-hero and post-modern, but not very satisfying in a movie that doesn't aspire to much in terms of deeper meanings.
* Another problem is that David acts extremely dumb at points, which makes it hard again to like him. After Roland tracks him down for the first time, David escapes but then goes back to his hometown and thence on an airline trip to Rome with his new girlfriend. Considering he's just learned that there's people out there who (a) know about his powers, (b) know how to nullify them, and (c) are at the least extremely unfriendly, the last thing I'd be doing is la-de-la-ing around my old hometown and then touring Italy.
* There was another writing/continuity problem early on. David is supposed to have died in an accident in an icy river, at least as far as most of his hometown knows. Yet, when he shows up 5-10 years later, the reaction is largely "Oh, you're back? Cool!" No explanation for why this would be so, when a guy who everybody thought was dead is suddenly back in town.
* Finally, Roland discovers about midway through the movie that his Paladin boss is also David's mother, yet he does nothing with this knowledge. At the end of the movie, we see David meet his mother, who basically says "I love you, which is why I'm giving you a head start (before we start hunting you again)." I'm guessing this was to set up some kind of sequel, but it didn't really fit with anything else in the film.
* The writer of Jumper, Steven Gould, blogs over at the left-of-center blog Eat Your Brains. His posts there are interesting in an inside-baseball way, but the posts tend toward the self-congratulatory and as one would expect there's a echo-chamber effect of every comment saying how wonderful the movie was.
So, like I said, somewhat fun but with fatal flaws. I hope they don't make a sequel, but they probably will.
* The movie is certainly easy on the eyes, with pretty people doing fun stuff. Samuel L. Jackson is solid, as always...and that leads in to my first problem. The main character, David (the "jumper" who can teleport from place to place, played by Hayden Christensen) is revealed early on to be a selfish, indulgent person, and he never really evolves from that throughout the movie. SLJ's character, a "Paladin" named Roland who is a member of an organization that hunts down and kills Jumpers, is supposed to be the bad guy, but he actually came across as more sympathetic than David. David robs banks and uses the money for his personal enjoyment while not bothering to help others (established very early in the story, albeit in an offhand way), while Roland is serving what he sees as a higher purpose of protecting the world from people like David who use their powers to exploit others. Roland's vicious, but he comes across as more sympathetic than David or the other major Jumper character, Griffin. In the end, there's nobody really left to root for, which is very anti-hero and post-modern, but not very satisfying in a movie that doesn't aspire to much in terms of deeper meanings.
* Another problem is that David acts extremely dumb at points, which makes it hard again to like him. After Roland tracks him down for the first time, David escapes but then goes back to his hometown and thence on an airline trip to Rome with his new girlfriend. Considering he's just learned that there's people out there who (a) know about his powers, (b) know how to nullify them, and (c) are at the least extremely unfriendly, the last thing I'd be doing is la-de-la-ing around my old hometown and then touring Italy.
* There was another writing/continuity problem early on. David is supposed to have died in an accident in an icy river, at least as far as most of his hometown knows. Yet, when he shows up 5-10 years later, the reaction is largely "Oh, you're back? Cool!" No explanation for why this would be so, when a guy who everybody thought was dead is suddenly back in town.
* Finally, Roland discovers about midway through the movie that his Paladin boss is also David's mother, yet he does nothing with this knowledge. At the end of the movie, we see David meet his mother, who basically says "I love you, which is why I'm giving you a head start (before we start hunting you again)." I'm guessing this was to set up some kind of sequel, but it didn't really fit with anything else in the film.
* The writer of Jumper, Steven Gould, blogs over at the left-of-center blog Eat Your Brains. His posts there are interesting in an inside-baseball way, but the posts tend toward the self-congratulatory and as one would expect there's a echo-chamber effect of every comment saying how wonderful the movie was.
So, like I said, somewhat fun but with fatal flaws. I hope they don't make a sequel, but they probably will.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-19 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-19 01:59 pm (UTC)Also, what bank allows someone, particularly a scruffy 15 year old boy who probably didn't smell all that good, to use their employee bathroom? Particularly in NYC. That never happens.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-22 05:55 pm (UTC)If I'm "self-congratulatory" about the movie it's more because it's just really cool that hundreds of people spent millions of dollars creating this movie from something I wrote. Perhaps the first fifteen minutes bears some resemblance to my book, but the movie certainly isn't an adaptation. I also think they didn't do as good a job as they could've at telling their own story (the director and screenwriters.)
To be honest, the only studio that consistently gets STORY right is Pixar.
I also think you missed most of the comments over at Eat Our Brains as they tend to be pro-book but anti-movie.
Ta,
Steve
no subject
Date: 2009-01-22 07:29 pm (UTC)Fair enough. And I thank you for the classy reply to what was basically a negative review of the movie, more than a few authors would be tempted to go the "yeah, well, I'm the one with the sales, so who's laughing now?" route, and it speaks well of you that you didn't do that. I appreciate it, and wish you continued success in your writing.
To be fair, I had high expectations because the trailer was so cool, and it was a disappointment that the movie itself didn't live up to that. I understand that cinema is a different animal from the written page and they can't cover every plot hole, otherwise you end up with a five-hour epic that nobody wants to sit through, but too much at the other extreme and there's problems, too. Just my 2 cents.