spoofmaster

I've had the novel Jumper in my possession for a while, and read it soon after getting down here to Florida. I'd been interested in the movie when I first saw the previews since the basic concept was an appealing one, but had read reviews recommending that one read the book instead. So I did, and it was utterly fantastic. I had trouble putting it down, and the older sci fi books I've been reading since have been disappointing because I miss reading Jumper. That's how much I liked it. But, having read it, I decided to get the movie from Netflix and see what they'd done with it. I knew it wasn't going to be great, but I figured that with such good source material, it had to at least be watchable, right?

Wrong. Completely awful. I absolutely loathe this movie. Couldn't even sit through it without getting my computer out and writing a review explaining how much I hate it to distract myself.

The book titled Jumper is a highly engaging, highly introspective book about a young man who has suffered a lifetime of abuse at the hands of his father before discovering at the age of nineteen that he has the ability to 'jump,' or teleport, and subsequently running away from home. The book combines the best of psychological storytelling with elements of science fiction, drawing the reader in as Davy Rice finds his way in the world with the help of Millie, a twenty-two-year-old psychology student he meets along the way. There are, of course, elements of an action story present, as seems almost inevitable in a novel about a young man with the ability to teleport, but they are in service to the overall story and character development.

The movie titled Jumper, on the other hand, is a shallow, vapid tale about a much less interesting version of Davy, dumbed down and made politically correct. Gone is the actual trauma that in the book led to Davy's stunted emotional growth, leaving the Davy of the movie nothing more than a brat with little or no reason for his selfish behavior. Gone are his struggles to establish himself in New York--that which provided the meat of the story for the novel is now compressed into the first act, thrown away in favor of playing up what the filmmakers no doubt thought was the more 'exciting' portion of the story. Even this is completely botched, with all subtlety thrown out the window, and some nonsense about 'paladins' and other jumpers inserted where there was previously a much more interesting contest of wills between Davy and certain agents of the NSA.

This movie is what happens when someone decides to make a movie out of a book, but doesn't bother to actually carry over any of the things that made that book work. For those who have only seen the movie without reading the book, this version of Jumper is most likely no worse than mind-numbingly boring and badly disjointed. For those who have read the book, however, the movie goes beyond dull and into the realm of the offensively bad.

In other news, I'm still working on that paper. This was my break from paper writing, and in retrospect it was not worth taking.