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What Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle gets right (and wrong) about video games

by: Eric -
More On: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

I caught a matinee showing of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle yesterday. The film, a sequel/remake to the 1995 Robin Williams “classic”, released last weekend and has been holding its own against the Star Wars juggernaut at the box office.

Jumanji:WTTJ centers on a group of teens that get sucked into a magic video game, and are forced to play out a scripted scenario as pre-selected video game characters. A lot of the humor centers on the fact that the teens are placed within character archetypes that do not match their real-world identities, forcing them to think and behave outside of their respective boxes.

While Jumanji is far from my favorite film of the year (either Logan or Coco, for the record), it was an amusing enough way to spend an afternoon. The film did seem to please the kid-heavy crowd I saw it with, and the smiles in the hallway indicated to me that everyone left the theater satisfied enough.

What was interesting about the film was the way it handled its video game-based subject matter. As any gamer knows, video games have a particular vocabulary, and the gamer community generally speaks the “language” of gaming. Watching the way Jumanji translated gaming tropes and culture into a feature film that needed to be understood by general audiences, I couldn’t help but subconsciously take note of some things the filmmakers did right, and a couple of things that felt a bit off to me.

There are some spoilers that follow, but really, it’s Jumanji. If you’ve seen the trailer, the film is already three-quarters spoiled for you.

Done Right: References to existing gaming franchises

Right out of the gate, Jumanji establishes its gaming cred with some references to a few relevant gaming franchises. The main character, Spencer, is a gamer. Adorning the walls of his bedroom are a variety of game posters, two of which jumped out at me right away. Uncharted 4 and The Last Guardian are both games that involve exploration of overgrown ruins, and team-work based adventure in jungle settings. The fact that the production team put these particular posters on the walls instead of throwing any old thing up for decoration showed me that they had some working knowledge of current video games and gaming culture. Additionally, in an early scene, Spencer is shown playing Street Fighter. Fighting game vocabulary comes back into play directly in a later portion of the film, rewarding this early “Easter egg”.

A Little Off: Character select

While some of the teen characters are assigned to viable video game characters, some of them are saddled with characters that no one in their right mind would ever select when playing a video game. The teenager known as “Fridge” gets thrown into the body of “Moose” (Mouse) Finbar, played by Kevin Hart to great comedic effect. While the character works within the confines of the film, no one on earth would ever want to actually play an action/adventure game as a character whose sole power is to carry stuff, and whose weaknesses are “Speed”, “Strength” and “Cake” (the “Cake” thing is actually a good gag). Additionally, popular-girl Bethany is reborn as Professor Shelly Oberon, a middle-aged male cartographer. This character would work great as a sidekick in an old film, but does not seem particularly worthwhile in videogame terms.

Done Right: NPCs

Throughout the film, the characters encounter NPCs who at first seem lifelike, until they start repeating their canned dialog. Part of the challenge for the characters in the film is to find the correct questions to ask the NPCs to elicit the correct response, allowing them to move forward in the game. Anyone that has played an RPG is familiar with this dynamic, and the effect in the film is welcome and funny.

A Little Off: Local Multiplayer

At the beginning of the film, the four teens gather around a fictitious gaming console, and each selects the character that they will be assigned to for the rest of the film. The characters are shown holding four controllers, and the teens are expecting to play the game simultaneously. Given the content of the rest of the film, I was wondering the entire time what kind of 20-year-old system would be capable of delivering the sort of adventure levels shown in local multiplayer. Were they going to be playing split-screen? Would the game be sprite based, or an early polygonal nightmare? How could four characters be represented on the screen at the same time during the motorcycle chase, for example? Now, I know that this is a fantasy film about a fantasy game being played on a fantasy system. I’m just sharing the fact that my mind rejected the idea that an older console would be capable of delivering content of this nature in four-player local multiplayer.

Done Right: Secret Pathways

At a point late in the film, the characters are shown a clear path forward, but reject it when they realize that an alternative way is available to them. Games of all types include secret routes and shortcuts, whether they are off-road throughways in racing games or underground passageways in RPGs and adventure titles. I got a chuckle out of seeing this gaming trope show up in the film.

A Little Off: Controllers

Can just one film or television show depict gamers holding a controller in a manner that is remotely realistic? Just one? Why does every film character in history clutch a gaming controller the way an ape paws at a banana, clanging away on the same button over and over again like a moron? Have no actors in Hollywood ever played a video game? For the love of all that is holy, can no one ever get this right?

Overall, though, I would say that Jumanji gets a lot more about gaming right than it gets wrong. The film just feels right, and it is really understandable that a kids’ movie might take a few liberties with gaming in order to please an audience of children and grandparents. I’m glad that the filmmakers seemed to have some respect for gaming culture, and made gaming part of the humor instead of the butt of the joke. Jumanji is a fun little film that gamers might get a couple of chuckles out of, which is more than I can say for 95% of gaming-related films.