Jumanji jumps back
After seeing trailers revealing how different a path the “Jumanji” remake took, many fans were not very keen on seeing how different the new movie was from the original.
The original film, released in 1995, was targeted at a younger audience and took on a much more intense and scary plot than the remake featuring some big comedic actors such as Kevin Hart and Jack Black.
The main cast consisted of Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Nick Jonas, Madison Iseman, Kevin Hart and Jack Black.
The movie begins with a flashback to 1996 when a teenager finds Jumanji and brings it back home with him. Curious about its content, he opens it and looks inside but is quickly bored and shifts his attention to his video game console. Suddenly, the game transforms into a disk and he decides to put it into the console. There is a flash of light and the teenager is ruled missing until another group of students discovered Jumanji once more 20 years later.
The beginning of the movie is relatively similar to the original in that somebody disappears for the next set of kids who discover the game to find. But as the film progressed, it drifted further and further away from the original story and closer to a much lighter plot to make it easier for a comedic script.
In the original movie, the board game sucked a boy into the game for 30 years, and spit him out a man to deal with the game all over again. Yet in the remake, the characters are sucked into a video console and become part of the game. Instead of being a life or death situation, each player of the game receives three lives, which allowed the producers to write a much lighter script filled with crude humor to fit a slightly older audience.
In one scene Moose Finbar, played by Kevin Hart pushed Fridge, played by Dwayne Johnson off a cliff and lets him fall to his death just because he’s mad at him since he knows that he will just come back with one less tally on his forearm.
Some believe that the movie should have stuck with the original storyline, but the producers took a gamble and pointed the movie in a completely new direction. Their bet rewarded them as many viewers loved the movie and the humor it brought along with it.
Overall, the new movie brought a completely new point of view to “Jumanji” and is a great movie for anybody who is looking for a funny movie to see in the next couple of weeks.
8/10
