Review: Jumper

My impression was that the characters were entirely forgettable[1], but it explored the possibilities of teleporting really well. It had lots of interesting ideas on the theme, demonstrated a fairly clear set of physics that made jumping very exciting, but not unlimitedly powerful, and filmed it in an exciting way.

It got quickly to the interesting bits; the first five minutes show the protagonist learning what he can do, and then how he can use that, both hopping about the world, but also showing clearly and naturally how he just automatically hops about his apartment, turning from the fridge and dropping himself on his couch, etc.

It's a paradigm which suited itself really well to exciting action scenes. It's a bit like a whole film about the Incredible Nightcrawler :) It reminds me of X-men or Heroes, except that it settles down and takes the time to explore one power, and all the interesting things you become with it. (And avoids the trap of "How can we make this power interesting? We've already shown clever uses of it... I know! Lets concoct a bullshit excuse why it makes you omnipotent in some completely different way, too.")

I don't know how it compares to the original book: I get the impression it kept the introduction superficially the same, but replaced character-stuff with eternal-crusade stuff. Which I think works very well in a film, though I don't know what people who liked the book would have thought.

[1] There was the protagonist, and the girl, and the second protagonist who disagreed with the protagonist and had a distinctive accent, and the antagonist, who had a distinctive appearance, and was played by Samuel L Jackson. I think the antagonist was called "Roland". The most interesting was the second protagonist.

Getting an anonymous annoyance off my chest

1. When recounting, you often call out one or two of the most obvious characteristics of someone involved. Eg. if you said "And I overheard two professors walking across Trinity College, and one of them says to the other 'And, ninethly...'" or "And I overheard two students walking across Trinity College, and..." even if it doesn't actually make any difference to the story.

2. I think this ties in to the tendency to make little provisional pictures in your head when listening to a story or hypothetical.

3. People often have a default little picture.

4. Sometimes their default little picture is unfair, (eg. a default doctor being male) and in aggregate constitutes prejudice.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, except that I often see an exchange that goes something like:

A: I saw a black man in the grocery store and he said...
B: Why is it relevant that he's black? Eh? Eh?

And I've a feeling that's a result of a miscommunication somewhere. I imagine that (1), (2) and (3) are natural human behaviour and inherently harmless (I may be wrong?), but often reveal a problem with (4).

Particularly, a noticeable characteristic is often one that differs from the default, so if the default is eg. adult white male, you might mention someone's gender or race if it's different, but mention some other characteristic if those are your "default" expectation.

I think you can try to change (4) by changing (3) and (2), eg. the common technique of picking a variety of people as examples. This can be clumsy, but is a sensible approach. However, whenever I read the A/B exchange I feel guilty for ever doing (1) at all. It may make sense to avoid it if it has the likelihood of bringing up prejudiced ideas, but I don't think it's inherently bigoted. However, of course, A and B often don't have the vocabulary to express the difference, just know that something's wrong with what the other said, so end up arguing without knowing exactly what they're arguing about.