At the Movies!

[ZpaceJ0ck0]

So I watched Jumanji: Welcome to The Jungle on September 9th, while on the 10th I've watched The Pursuit of Happyness (the first movie in which Will and Jaden Smith starred togheter).

Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle: I am not going to waste my energy reviewing this film since gamemaster already speak out my mind.

What I am going to do instead, however, is to give my own explanation for the confusing (at first) ending. Yes, there are people who are confused about the ending. 

Spoiler

So as you may remenber, Welcome to the Jungle is what people call an Independent sequel/Soft rebbot, right? As in the sense of "you can enjoy this work indenpendently without prior knowledge of the prequel". You better keep this in mind as we go along.

I am not going to take into account the original children's book written by Chris Van Allsburg and published in 1981, since 1. I did not read it and 2. from what I could find Alan Parrish and Sarah Whittle did not exist back then (correct me if I am wrong), and they are pivotal in order to understand the ending of Welcome to the Jungle and how it connects to the original movie adaptation from 1995.

SO... recap time.

In the first Jumanji movie, Alan Parrish and his friend Sarah Whittle found the cursed board game 'Jumanji' in 1969. They started playing and at one point Alan gets sucked into the game. Later some bats come out of the chimney and Sarah runs away, but at the cost of the round being left unfinished and Adan getting trapped inside of the game for the next 26 years.

Fastfoward to the year 1995 and the Shepherd family moved to the mansion fomerly know as the Parrish Mansion, were brothers Peter and Judy Shepper rediscover 'Jumanji' and they decided to play the game. Because he (Peter) got a second turn, he rolls a 5 and releases Alan Parrish. Then the three go to find Sarah Whittle who joins the game. A bunch of stuff happens and the round from 1969 get's finally finished, reseting the timeline back to where it all began, with only Alan and Judy remenbering stuff that never happened, although certain elements/modifications the Jungle suffered where left untouched, but that's something we are going to talk about later. They throw the board game into the river so that nobody has to experience something similar ever again. Unfortunely the game gets washed away to the French coasts where it's found by two ramdon girls, likely repeating history.

Fastfoward to 1996 and Jumanji gets dragged back to the coast of Brantford. Alex Vreeke's father finds the game and gives it to his son as a present. Because of Alex Vreeke's lack of interest in board games, Jumanji transforms into a video game. Much like Adam, he gets sucked into the game/jungle, where he finds Adam's old posse. The round gets unfinished until 20 years later, where four high school students play the game after finding it while on detention inside of a "donate" box. With the help of Alex (Aka Jefferson "Seaplane" McDonough), they complete the game and the round of 1996 gets finished. Thsi is where things differ vastly from the original movie. 

Where in the original Jumanji movie the time line was completely restarted and the Shepper brothers don't remenber any of the events, in Welcome to the Jungle the rest of the players returned to 2016 with their memories intact, meanwhile Alex was sent back in time to 1996 to the moment he left, altering history somewhat. 

OK, so how did this happen? 

The fact the the time/reality bending abilities where changed could be explained as a side effect of Jumanji going from a cursed board game to a cursed video game. But what does that mean? How does that even work? How can the players from 2016 remenber everything that happened while Alex gets sent back in time?

Simple, instead of reseting the timeline, the game alters history in the sense that some events happened, just not in the way they (the players) remenber. 

For example, at the beginning of the film Spencer and Anthony decided to meet in front of the haunted house, that's what THEY remenber, but not everyone around them. What they saw was Spencer and Anthony reuniting in front of the Vreeche's family house. In other words, the players from 2016 are timeline displaced.

"but what about the game?" wouldn't Alex want to destroy it as soon as he got out of there?"

Well, It's likely that Alex wanted to destroy it but he couldn't for one reason or another. Maybe Alex instantly fell asleep (or hit itself in the head, I'm sure you can come up with something better) as soon as he got out of the game. And the next morning he finds out that his father grabbed the old console and donated it, much to Alex' misfortune. Like I said, the same events but under different circumstances. 

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 So yeah. This is the hypothesis I came up with after discussing the ending with a friend. Any feedback?

And yes. The whole "recap time" was neccesary.

Also, I cannot believe it took me this long to find out Zathura is a Jumanji spin-off! It was so obvious! This is even worse considering I loved that movie back in the day (and still do, to certain extent). 

The Pursuit of Happyness: Not much to say about this movie (this doens't mean it is bad). Is based on a real story about overcaming hardships. Will Smith nails it as the single father who constantly gets the short end of the stick.

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As for September 14th? I've watched Avengers: Infinity War!

Spoiler

I liked it. It is easily the best Avengers movie to date.

The interactions between the different characters were great, specially the ones invloving Tony Stark/Dr. Strange and Thor/Rocket, and the screentime each of the many characters recieved was balanced really well. The action scenes were great too, my personal favorite being the fight against Thanos on Planet Titan.

As for the ending? Well, it did not affect me that much. Maybe it's because I was spoiled beforehand and that it was announced that a new Spider Man movie was on the way (meaning that at least Parker would survive his "fate"). That being said, it's still a really well done scene and thankfully I wasn't spoiled about the rest of the movie/what happened before... well, the ending.

Speaking of which. Here are my favorite moments in the film:

1. The return of The Red Skull: for 7 years since the first Captain America movie came out, fans were wondering about what happened to this iconic villian. And now we finally got our answer after waiting for so long. This particular moment was the one who caught me out of guard the most.

2. When Teenage Groot cut off his own arm in order to make the handle for the Stormbreaker: decent character evolution for Groot. I also liked it because it was kind of hardocore, I'm not going to lie.

Looking foward to Avengers 4.

Oh yeah, sorry for uploading this one so late. Life got in the way. I was also planning on creating a TGS thread to talk about all of the announcements made as they were revealed (kind of like the Gamescom 2016 or our yearly E3 threads). Either that or find an existing thread about a TGS from a previous year and turn it into a TGS general thread BUT....