What if when you played monopoly you were giving out real money, or when you played Risk you were actually risking your life? The movie Jumanji focuses on the story of a board game that allows you to actually become part of the game.
Robin Williams plays Alan Parrish, a man who discovered the game more than twenty years before the beginning of the movie. In the movie two children are moving into the Parrish estate with their aunt and discover the game. The children are able to release a now much older Alan from the game. Alan finds their Aunt, the girl that he once played the game with when he was younger, and they all start to play the game again. The catch of the board game is you have to win in order to escape otherwise you can be trapped in the game forever.
The concept of this movie seems like it would be geared toward extremely young children, but the movie has so much peril it really isn’t appropriate for children under ten or eleven. The movie can get pretty violent at times, and I have to admit I was a litte scared every now and then with the action.
Depending on your child you also run the risk that they may be reluctant to play board games in the future. I doubt that it would get to that level in most cases, but you never know.
I thought this movie was a fantastic idea. When the movie was released it go a lot of bad press for being a waste of the acting talents of Helen Hunt and Robin Williams…but I still think it’s a pretty great movie. The idea for this movie game from a children’s picture book, which when stretching into a full length movie tends to be a little far fetched plot wise.