Review: Jumper

[jack]

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.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I have not read the book, though papersky has it so I could easily do so, one of these months when my impile becomes slightly more manageable. I gather that the character in the book has a really horrible abusive family, and on escaping them goes on to have fun fairly light-hearted adventures; most of the criticisms I have seen levelled at this film, beyond Hayden Christiansen's apparently being made out of solid formica, has been that it softened the family stuff considerably while adding gratuitous Samuel L. Jackson from some mistaken notion of the scale of conflict necessary to make a plot work; and much though i like Samuel L. Jackson, the paladin notion did feel gratuitous to me, definitely, meeting one other jumper with a different ethical schema who gave him a bit of hassle about all the stealing not actually being nice would have worked as adequate conflict for my tastes (given a principal who could actually act).

I agree that it was very good indeed on thinking through how being able to teleport might actually shape one's life, though.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I read the book many years ago... a large point of the book was trying to rebuild your life after abuse. If you remove that... it's a different story.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's what I suspected (from the wikipedia description). I thought the film was a very good example of a film with no characters and great effects and ideas, but that's sort of a let-down to a book where the effects were there illustrating an interesting treatment of a really difficult and important topic.