In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week we take a look at Zathura: A Space Adventure, Favreau’s third feature as a director and his most effects-heavy effort to-date.
Space is so cool. I’m not even talking about like nebulas and quasars and all the stuff you’d see on an episode of Cosmos. I’m talking spaceships and jetpacks and robots and… Ya know, if you asked me to summarize Jon Favreau’s third directorial feature, Zathura, in just one sentence, that would probably be it. “Spaceships and jetpacks and robots, oh my!” When you get right down to it, that’s pretty much all Zathura is. And that’s all it needed to be.
Zathura 1is a sort-of sequel to Chris Van Allsburg’s “Jumanji”. While the book was written and illustrated to take place in the same universe, with different kids and a different board game, the movie severs all those connections and just stands as its own thing. Which is fine. Anyone who’s seen Jumanji will already know what’s up, and anyone who hasn’t will pick it up pretty quick. This is, after all, a movie for children.
The movie follows two kids—ten-year-old Walter (Josh Hutcherson2) and his 6-year-old brother Danny (Jonah Bobo)—spending the weekend with their workaholic dad (Tim Robbins). While dad leaves to go to the office, Walter and Danny inevitably start fighting. Danny just wants to play, but Walter wants nothing to do with him. Walter’s a little more grown up, which means he’s kind of a dickhead and all he cares about is sports. Danny is only six and not good at sports, so naturally Walter can’t stand him. It’s not Danny’s fault, he’s just a little kid. Danny finds an old board game in the basement, and drags it upstairs to show Walter, who immediately dismisses it with a short “Looks dumb.”
This is the titular Zathura, a retro 50s-style board game with a tin metal mechanical board, rotating pieces, and all kinds of neat little space-age illustrations on it. It’s a great little bit of prop design, and the movie mines some real tension out of every turn of the key, every press of the button, every roll of the mechanical die. It also looks old as hell, adding an extra dash of tension because you’re constantly afraid that these kids are gonna get stuck in space forever because one of them accidentally broke this fragile antique board game.
Because, yeah, that could happen. As soon as Danny starts the game, the house is bombarded with meteor showers, and we discover that suddenly the whole thing has been flung into outer space. The boys step outside their front door and witness the rings of Saturn, completely unfazed by the fact that they can somehow breath on their front porch. Or in the house, for that matter, as the whole thing slowly gets turned into swiss cheese. In addition to meteor showers, the boys have to brave gravity wells, a killer robot (voiced by Frank Oz!), and some gnarly-looking alien lizard people. Danny and Walter take turns rolling the die and drawing cards, which presage the next five minutes or so of space-themed mayhem.
Also along for this particular ride is their older sister Lisa (Kristen Stewart), who really only exists in this movie as an excuse for why dad feels comfortable leaving the boys home alone in the first place. And then there’s an astronaut (Dax Shepard), who boards the house at one point, revealing that he’s a fellow Zathura player and has been stranded in space for the last fifteen years. There’s another little twist involving his character that’s perfectly obvious to anyone old enough to drive, but one that also doesn’t make a ton of sense if you stop to think about it too long.
The bulk of the movie finds the astronaut having to wrangle Walter and Danny, forcing them to stop fighting and work as a team to finish the game. This turns out to be easier said than done because, man, Walter and Danny just plain fuckin’ hate each other. I don’t know if these two kids were just really good actors, or if they genuinely didn’t like one another, because they really sell the whole ‘bickering little kids’ dynamic well. Almost too well, to be honest. But then, I feel like you have to grade this kind of thing on a curve because it’s definitely pitched that way for kids. Kids get not wanting anything to do with your little brother, or being the little brother and just wishing your older brother would still play with you. The emotions in this thing get pretty raw, even if it’s still situated 100% in the Kid Zone.
Admittedly, Zathura isn’t an especially deep film. I’d even dare say it’s not as deep as Joe Johnston’s adaptation of Jumanji. That film had a little bit of juice in the tank thanks to the whole theme of colonial adventure tourism and generational trauma. (No, really, go back and watch Jumanji sometime. Pay attention to Robin Williams’ family history. It’s a little nuts.) Zathura, on the other hand, gets by purely on the retro-futuristic aesthetic. Everything has that big, bulky industrial vibe to it, right down to the armor on the Zorgon aliens. The whole thing has such a pitch perfect design to it that I’m willing to give it a pass just on that alone.
Released in November of 2005, Zathura took in $65.1 million at the box office, which is just barely enough to cover its $65 million price tag. It opened second at the box office that weekend, just behind Disney’s Chicken Little. That’s actually a pretty good marker for the changing times. Chicken Little found Disney struggling to play catch-up to Pixar and Dreamworks in the computer animation game, but name recognition alone put that film over the top. Zathura, on the other hand, with all its practical effects trickery, probably looked woefully old-fashioned in comparison. Which is a shame, because you just plain don’t see movies made like this anymore. So all I can say here is God bless ‘em for trying.
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
Jon Favreau relished the opportunity to play in the sandbox of special effects popularized by Star Wars and the like. He, like George Lucas before him, understood that CGI was simply one tool among many, and as I’ve mentioned a couple times at this point, he seemed hellbent on utilizing every trick at his disposal. Whereas Elf gave him the chance to play around with animation and forced perspectives, Zathura found him tinkering with miniature models, creature effects courtesy of Stan Winston’s team of artists, and even at one point putting the entire house set on a rotating gimbal. The movie might not have set the world on fire, but you can see Favreau putting in the work to figuring out this whole ‘special effects’ thing. Stay tuned for more of that.
One other item worth mentioning: As part of the film’s promotional campaign, Zathura was featured in a season 4 episode of NBC’s The Apprentice. The contestants were tasked with concocting a parade float for the purposes of advertising the film. Apparently the biggest hurdle among the contestants was their complete and utter inability to pronounce the film’s title. Favreau was on hand to judge the final results, and considering how well the film did at the box office, you can guess how successful that campaign went. The episode is out there (Season 4, episode 5 if you’re curious), but for obvious reasons I chose not to subject myself to that shit.
FINAL VERDICT
3 stars (out of 5). S’pretty good.
NEXT TIME: Vince Vaughn’s back, baby!
- The full title is Zathura: A Space Adventure, I guess because Zathura is a nonsense word and if you’re not already staring at the poster art you’re not gonna know what the hell a Zathura is. Then again, if you’re not already looking for Zathura, I don’t really see what difference that makes.
↩︎ - Just the year before this, Hutcherson provided the motion capture performance for the main kid in The Polar Express, another Van Allsburg adaptation. ↩︎
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