Jumper

My son and I saw this on Friday. Based on the reviews on Rotton Tomatoes I told him, “I get the impression this will be like a slightly longer version of the trailer.” This turned out to be a pretty accurate impression and since I liked the trailer I liked the movie. But it wasn’t a good movie by any stretch of the imagination so maybe in five years I’ll be posting it to the bad movies I liked thread. I’m sure that if I had read the book I’d be out murdering people with an axe right now.

I’m considering seeing this, expecting exactly that! :)

I would love it if hollywood sci-fi offered up more asiac asimov, David Gerrold, or Piers Anthony calibre of sci-fi. However you just have to settle for what you can get sometimes…and this one looks like a decently shot, interesting visuals, but light in the plot take on a otherwise interesting premise. I also expect to be annoyed by Anakin not a real actor, but i pretend to be one in movies.

The best thing that has come out of this movie is my new awareness of the book, which sounds awesome.

Well, then I guess it was worth it.

Kinda.

Just saw this last night. I was expecting it to be cheesy and not very good, and it thoroughly met my expectations. I had never heard of the book before, and after reading the thread, I agree with DoomMunky, at least it it gave me that.

A couple of things really bothered me (spoilers below!!)

  1. Dropping Samuel Jackson off in a cave instead of killing him. Huh? That made no sense at all.
  2. The scene where you saw Jackson kill a teenage boy by stabbing him through the stomach with a knife - and this movie was rated PG-13? But OMG can’t show boobies. I’m familiar with the ‘violence OK, boobies bad’ rating style, but somehow that sequence seemed way more graphic than was necessary. Perhaps I’ve become over-sensitive to scenes of violence against characters under 18 now I’m a parent, who knows. But that bothered me.

My problem with the movie was that halfway through I realized that Sam Jackson really was the good guy, but the movie didn’t seem to agree with me. Griffin teleports a bus to the desert to attack Sam Jackson’s character. Except we just saw the bus, it’s a London double-decker, it was moving. So Griffin just killed two dozen innocent tourists and a bus-driver to fail to attack Jackson? Then later when Griffin wants to send the bomb back to kill the Paladins, our hero, Hayden, is all “Nooo! We need to save my large-headed girlfriend!” and doesn’t seem to give a shit about the fact that the apartment building is probably full of innocent people who don’t deserve to being blown up.

The jumpers really are a bunch of dickheads.

In the book, Davey exacts his revenge on the terrorist who killed his mother by imprisoning him in this cave that can only be reached by teleportation. (for starters) That sounds like a very loose adaptation of that particular part of the plot.

This holds my Worst Rental of the Year award so far. F&$^ing pointless and awful.

Watched on a flight to Europe. Worst movie of the year bar none.

Watched it last night. The only good part was the 1:28 running time, so at least it wasn’t overlong crap.

SPOILERY COMPLAINTS:

  1. So much potential in the development of the protagonist’s powers and examining the life he leads, and they piss it away in favor of “he has a nice apartment and goes surfing a lot.” What were the lessons he learned? Did he ever try earning an honest living? Has he tried to affect the events of the world? This doesn’t even get a montage, instead they waste time on the lovelorn intro.
  2. Stupid, stupid, antagonists. As if they were written by 5-year-olds who simply declare “these are the bad guys.” I never saw the reason behind their actions, the point for the religious affiliation (was this by itself supposed to establish they were bad guys?), or an explanation for their obviously vast resources.
  3. Poorly developed relationship between the protagonist and love interest. We just got done establishing that he’s a self-indulgent jerk who thinks he’s the only one of his kind, so why would be be cagey around the girl he’s LOVED all his life? That didn’t make a bit of sense – his arrogance would have made him a showoff.
  4. Bad script with inconsistent rules. The movie took great pains to show that he first “jumped” when he was 15, and then later says his powers manifested when he was 5. Then, they require “jump points” to teleport, except when they don’t. His mom is a Paladin, except that’s really meaningless except she’s revealed to be an “enemy” without any real consequence in the film. The other jumper is a jackass who gives us no reason to root for him.
  5. Hasn’t anybody in this film heard of projectile weapons? A shotgun would have been amazingly effective against guys armed only with electric harpoons who couldn’t teleport.

I won’t argue with any of those points except for one. The jump points they used were what they called something like “jump scars”, which were basically wormholes left behind by other jumpers that led to the last location they jumped to.

But yeah, the movie stunk. To be honest, I think I could’ve overlooked most of the dumb things about it had they not used the ever-horrible Christensen in the lead role. Or anywhere in the movie. The premise for the movie, though, was great. The execution was retarded.

Look at my post above. There’s no reason to root for any of these characters. In the end I was hoping Sam Jackson just killed them all because he was apparently right. Jumpers are a bunch of shitheads.

Anyone who’s disappointed with the lack of a Jumper Rifftrax can relax now. I plan to rent and watch this tonight which probably guarantees that the Rifftrax will show up some time in the next few days.

I thought they had to either be there or see a picture of a place to be able to jump to it, thus Jackson being pleased that he found all of the photos HC was using to jump.

Not that it really matters much. We’re not exactly talking flawed masterpiece here.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again - if you think the movie’s premise had promise, you really need to run out and snag a copy of the book (the original one, by Steven Gould. I guess there’s now some movie-related tie-in book that’s probably crap.)

Tried to watch this tonight, couldn’t get through it. The whole movie just annoyed me. Why should I care about an amoral douchebag who can teleport that’s being chased by other amoral douchbags?

I am kinda interested in reading the book now, though.

Just a random point I’ve been thinking about:

It annoys me, that every time there is something supernatural going on, it has a longer history that the main character is not aware of. How about, for once, doing a story where the supernatural element is something that has never seen before, and people are trying to cope with it.

That’s why I really liked the beginning of Heroes. But annoyingly, they had to choose the path that there is a longer history involved and it degenerated into basic superhero drama. Just like with Jumper.

Well, I think for a lot of people there’s this idea that it’s probably unlikely that X event, whatever it is, is truly unprecedented. You have an idea, achieve something, develop some disease, whatever, it’s relatively unlikely you’re the first person to have it. It smacks of mary sue-ishness in a supernatural type story, if the protagonist is such a unique snowflake, and it helps sell certain far fetched ideas if you create a whole history for it instead of kind of pulling it out of your ass in the here and now.

Plus people (generally) love secret organizations and secret societies and conspiracies and whatnot.

Also, no offense to the guy, I’m sure he’s a perfectly decent fellow, but why do people hire Hayden Christiansen? He’s unbelievably wooden, always.

I agree with your points, I just mean this has become a cliche. Would love to see somebody taking a different approach.

For whatever inexplicable reason, genre writers in particular can’t resist the retcon. Even in their own stuff.