With nothing to do last night I decided to go see a movie. After carefully weighing my options I decided to see Jumper. One of my best friends has read the book and says it’s one of his favorites, even to the point that he owns two copies of it. I had high(read : unrealistic!) hopes for the movie considering the way said friend waxed on about the book. He hasn’t had a chance to see the movie yet and seemed trepidatious about how the movie is translated from the book. Typically great books turned into movies, well, suck! Now to be fair, I have not read the book so had no pre-conceived notions before hand. Unless you count the build up from my friend.

As a movie it was all right but not in my favorites of all time. I left with a few questions about how some things are the way they are and how the bad guys are portrayed. It seems that now-a-days that the only religious zealots that are portrayed are crazy Christians, or at the very least pseudo-Christians, bent on punishing everyone who doesn’t believe how they do. The movie pushes this across very strongly with our bad guys, Paladins. They hunt after the Jumpers, who can pop in and out of any place the have been or have seen a picture of.

Personally, I would love to do this, I would really save time going to the store.

If you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want to know what happens, don’t read past this point…

They movie follows a young man, played by Anakin… I mean Hayden Christiansen, who has the ability to “jump” from one point to another. We follow his initial discovery of this talent at age 15, jump forward eight years and go from there. That’s where Darth… I mean Hayden’s character picks up. We are also introduced to the Paladins lead by Roland, played by Samuel L. Jackson, one of my favorite all-time actors. You can call him Mr. Jackson. The movie establishes very early that the reason the Paladins are chasing and killing Jumpers is because they consider them to be an abomination to God, since God should be the only one who can go anywhere He wants. Not only does this fly in the face of most people who call themselves Christians but completely separates itself from the book, and in my opinion ruins the movie.

As I said earlier, I haven’t read the book, so I grilled my friend as to how the book worked. Here is the book in a nut-shell. Boy discovers he can jump, mom gets killed in a terrorists(the Middle-eastern variety) attack on a plane she is flying on, boy takes revenge, runs away from abusive drunkard father to New York, robs bank, CIA tracks him with help from dad, boy(now a young man) finds terrorist responsible for mom’s death and puts him on island with CIA guy who promptly kills Mr. Baddy. Boy also kills some other terrorists along the way by popping in and out behind said baddies and busting caps all up in ‘em.

Now, apparently the books never once mentions religious fanatics hell-bent on killing abominations, ever. Well, unless you consider the terrorists. Anyway, in the movie the boys mom leaves him a the tender young age of 5 to a lousy drunk dad. Great mom, huh? Boy grows up missing mom and mad at dad, discovers his ability, runs away from home, robs a bank(or two apparently), lives a nice quiet - and luxurious - lifestyle for eight years till he’s found by the Paladins who have been looking for him since he robbed the banks. Boy goes back to home town, meets girl-hood crush again, takes her to Rome and abandons her in the airport after his first meeting with Paladin baddies - where he also meets another Jumper, has to go and save girl from baddies using her to catch him and ultimately beats both the other crazy Jumper and the Roland, while sparring both of their lives in interesting ways.

If they had just made the movie like the book or even close to the book this would have been an excellent movie. But they didn’t. For whatever reason, political correctness, philosophy, whatever. Apparently its not O.K. to portray arabs as terrorists anymore but it is for Christians. Hmmm…

This movie will go right up there with Battlefield Earth and Alien 3 & 4 as moments that I am pissed I will never get back again. Too bad I can’t jump back in time and fix it, hey, great idea for the next movie!

Don

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Movies, Sections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.