Relatively speaking, an imaginative children's film (from a book by Chris Van Allsburg, author also of The Polar Express and, more relevantly, Jumanji) about two battling brothers from a broken home, ages ten and six-and-three-quarters, who find themselves adrift in outer space inside the "creaky" old house of their absent father, after the younger one dusts off a wind-up board game in the cellar, labelled Zathura, A Space Adventure. (If ever there was an excuse once again to cue the opening bars of Also Sprach Zarathustra, this would have been it: Also Sprach Zathura.) They encounter a hailstorm of meteors, a haywire robot, a marooned astronaut, and a troop of light-seeking, flesh-eating reptiles called Zorgons; and over the course of all that, they learn brotherhood. The interplanetary house should bring to mind, provided it ever entered your mind, the elegant antique Winsor McCay cartoon, Flying House, from his Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend series. The whole thing, for that matter, fits the definition of "dreamlike," albeit in ways very dissimilar to those of Winsor McCay. The loudness, the violence (nonlethal, nonsanguinary), the tons of special effects, and the dearth of visual skills (Jon Favreau, director) are simply to be endured as conditions of existence in the 21st Century. They are particularly worth enduring for the cryogenically frozen older sister taking a tumble down the stairs like a toboggan, and, still in one piece, getting lugged back up again like a mannequin. With Jonah Bobo, Josh Hutcherson, Dax Shepard, Kristen Stewart, Tim Robbins. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.