Directed by Jon Favreau Written by David Koepp and John Kamps Based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg Produced by Michael De Luca, Scott Kroopf and William Teitler Music by John Debney Cinematography by Guillermo Navarro Edited by Dan Lebental Production Design by J. Michael Riva Cast Josh Hutcherson (Walter) Jonah Bobo (Danny) Dax Shepard (Astronaut) Kristen Stewart (Lisa) Tim Robbins (Dad) Frank Oz (Voice of Robot)

“Oh no!” you might think. “Jumanji 2!” You have good reason to feel fear: Zathura: A Space Adventure looks like a retread of the successful but reviled 1995 adventure film, also based on a picture book by Chris Van Allsburg, only with a space opera setting instead of a jungle one. Kids play a mysterious game that plunges them into dangers with each turn they take, their fate doled out through messages that bring to life some new terror. Can they get through the game and reach the last square before the weird forces do them in?

On the count of similarity to Jumanji, Zathura pleads guilty. But extenuating circumstances will keep it from doing any prison time, because Zathura has a heart and a sense of fun that the earlier film completely lacked. It won’t appease most adult viewers, but younger kids—especially boys—will get a huge kick out of it without completely aggravating their parental units. As a boy at heart, and a science-fiction nerd to boot, I don’t feel an ounce of shame in saying that I had a pretty darn spiffy time watching this pint-sized space opera.

A great deal of credit goes to the child leads, Josh Hutcherson and Jonah Bobo, who play the feuding brothers Walter and Danny. Danny is the young ‘un, still getting used to catching a thrown baseball without dropping it, and Walter is a fifth-grade know-it-all who teases his brother for being a baby and accuses him of cheating at everything. The tension between the two characters feels extremely real, and it matches that of many real-life young siblings I’ve known. Hutcherson (superb as a romantic lead in the adorable Little Manhattan in particular has his part down perfectly, responding to his little brother’s statement of “I’m hungry,” with a subbed “What do you want me to do about it?” He nails every line like a genuine older brother brat.

Even the youngest children viewers will figure out exactly where the relationship between Walter and Danny will head. Danny pulls out the dusty 1950s board game “Zathura” from the basement of their father’s old house and begs his brother to play with him. (The script implies that the father recently purchased the house after his divorce, which means that the previous owners left the game there—or perhaps the game has always been part of the house, which is itself a relic of the 1940s or 1950s.) The game sends a shower of meteors down on the living room, uproots the house from the Earth and sends it into the rings of Saturn, freezes their sister Lisa into cryogenic sleep, and sends a manic robot thrashing through the downstairs. So now the feuding brothers now have to work together to finish the game (you can’t play it solitaire!) and save themselves, and our characters arcs for the rest of the film are firmly established. It’s cosmic mayhem (complete with human-eating alien aggressors) and fraternal bonding time. The science-fiction dangers do start to get tiresome, especially in the middle of the film, and the structural requirements that the game forces on the story might wear down the patience of older viewers and some of the littler ones with short attention spans. It falls to Bobo and Hutcherson to prop up the sagging parts, and they do a professional job at it.

As for the performances of the other actors, there isn’t that much to judge. The small cast list above is complete, aside from the stuntmen inside the robot and Zorgon suits. Dax Shepard has the largest role as the astronaut who materializes from one of the cards selected on Danny’s turn, and hangs around to lend an experienced hand in danger, a part he plays adeptly if unremarkably. Teenage sister Lisa (Kirsten Stewart from Panic Room) spends most of her screen time as a cryogenically frozen popsicle, and Tim Robbins bookends the story as a believably loving yet overworked divorced dad.

The design team crafts an attractive retro-science fiction design to aim for maximum nostalgia. The look has little to do with movie science fiction of the 1950s, but takes inspiration from pulp magazine covers of the 1940s like Astounding and Amazing, newspaper strips such as Flash Gordon, and children’s toys of the 1950s. The old game of Zathura itself sets the design scheme with its painted metal surface, creaky chains and gears, and analog “digital” display that spin each time a player turns the key to take his turn; it’s the sort of toy the children in the audience could imagine their grandparents playing when they were kids. The evil Zorgon aliens travel in steel n’ bolts spaceships with fins, and the globular attack robot looks like the cousin of the Omnidroid in last year’s retro-fifties The Incredibles. The score from John Debney blusters and swaggers just like an old movie serial and adds to the experience.

It doesn’t count as a classic family film, not by light-years, but Zathura: A Space Adventure manages to work in spite of its repetitive heritage, and it contains some of the most believable child acting I’ve seen a while. And it has a certain “Saturday Matinee” feeling to it that gels well with the retro-design, and that’s something hard to resist—for me anyway.

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