Something Missing
It hasn’t been all sturm und drang the past couple of weeks; I did actually get out to see two recent films based on young-adult novels, Jumpers and Spiderwick Chronicles. Now, there’s a lot of good YA lit out there that I read and enjoy; Phillip Pullman is my current favorite. The film version of his Golden Compass wasn’t bad, but it seemed to be missing something…a theme that carried through both Jumpers and Spiderwick Chronicles.
I have to say that I loved the concept of Jumpers, and even the inconsistent physics didn’t really bother me (example: does momentum carry through on a jump, or not?). The action sequences were exciting and watchable. But somehow, it didn’t grab me. Nothing was particularly bad, but I didn’t think that anything was particularly noteworthy, either. I haven’t read the book, so perhaps whatever-it-is that the film lacks comes through in print. All in all, I found it mildly entertaining, but wouldn’t have missed it if I’d missed it.
I do know exactly what I was missing from Spiderwick Chronicles—character development. This film’s pacing is definitely designed to hold the interest of a young audience, and that doesn’t leave much room for depth. Throw in a happy ending—something I tend to find unsatisfying in mot cases—and the film comes off as pretty, but lightweight. The production design is very nice; the special effects have an excellent degree of realism, and the actor who plays both Jared and Simon did such a good job that I didn’t realize until the end credits that it was the same kid. Again, I haven’t read the book(s), so perhaps that would be a more satisfying version of the story for me. But I didn’t really have a reason to care about the film’s characters, so I didn’t.
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March 4th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Read the original Jumper. I did when I first heard about the movie, and it and its sequel are both very good YA fiction - character development, moral quandaries, and they get to beat the bad guys in the end. All the best elements of YA fiction!
The href=”http://www.amazon.com/Jumper-Griffins-Story-Steven-Gould/dp/0765357852/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b”>re-write of Jumper that was done as a starting point for the screenplay was much less enjoyable - it took out a lot of the elements of the story I liked best about “how do you fight the monsters without becoming them”, plus it removed many of the motivations that the bad guys had for their actions. In the first book the “bad guys” are believable, and have realistic motivations - they are protecting what they see as their interests, not just twirling mustaches and being evil for the sake of being evil. The motivations of the characters in the re-write are much less clear.
From what I could make out of the plot from the trailers, the actual movie that was made wanders even further from the original premise, and doesn’t stick very well to the re-write either, so I’m not sure how it would compare to either. But I went from being very excited when I first saw the trailers this past fall, to “it’s on my netflix list for when it comes out” after having read the books because I’m fairly certain it won’t live up to what it could have been, and I’d rather not spend the ticket price on that.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Bah - sorry about the botched tag. HTML still defeats me on a regular basis.