Movie Review: Zathura: A Space Adventure

***Zathura: A Space Adventure*** is a movie released on November 11, 2005 and watched for the first time on November 25, 2020. This movie has a lot of odd occurrences, most especially a game that literally putted their house *into space*. When a brother got punished by another brother for arguing and broke something while fighting to grab it free, he found a board game in the basement called by the same name as the movie. The first card came out of the game said 'Meteor shower', that upon showing his brother, a tiny meteor punched a hole in the card right in the 'Meteor shower' text. Then another, another. That's the first weird moment of this film. They took cover in the fireplace from the meteors, which proved that it actually protected them. After opening the front door after the meteors stopped, they found out, very strangely, there's a planet with rings and debris in orbit right out the front door!! After trying to talk to his sister about the game, the next card caused the bathroom she's in to become like the interior of the igloo, and her sister was frozen solid. Wow! A later card summoned the robot and another an astronaut ringing the doorbell and he himself let in. Most dramatically, a card summoned the Zorgons, which I haven't heard off, which I'll learn by finding out. Zorgons is a race of aliens that control the ship in space that has cannons on the sides, which remind me of ships in *Pirates of the Caribbean*. Except instead of using cannons to attack other ships in the ocean in *POTC*, in this movie, the ship attack the house in space! That's funny! It turned out, the heat from the house, whether it be from the furnace or stove that has blue flame running, attracted those, and proved that it worked by setting the couch on fire and throw out through the door into space so Zorgons chased it and therefore got away from the house. When one cheated in the game, by moving forward without spinning then another player moves back, the latter player is ejected into space, but the astronaut, who later revealed to be *older himself* from alternate universe, caught him and got back into the house. Then their sister summoned the Zorgons to attack the house once again, albeit indirectly, by turning the heat back on. That's where things get lot more chaotic and difficult to survive. There will be Zorgon aliens coming to the house and try to steal the board game. If aliens got away with the game, the two brothers, their sister, an astronaut would face the eternal home confinement in space. Fortunately, they retrieved the game from the basement before the alien picked it up with a fork and put into the flame and finished the game, which caused the Zorgons and even his brother to fall into a black hole, bringing them (himself and his siblings, and their house) back home on Earth. Upon picking up the game, instead of putting the game into the flame, he looked behind after a noise was made and the noise made the alien hesitant to put the game into the flame, which he really should've done before the boy grabbed it. That alien made a horrible mistake, which gave them wishful luck to the boy and his family.

I enjoyed the movie *Zathura* a lot. It's out of this world, it's adventurous, it's operatic, it's fun, it's weird in astronomical ways. On December 12, 2020, I found out from reading the Wikipedia article about the movie that *Zathura* is actually in the same franchise as *Jumanji*, which I haven't seen any of those. I heard of the movie for the last couple years, but I haven't been interested in watching it. In the light of finding this out, I would check them out.

9/10