Joe Johnston's 1995 film Jumanji turns thirty, upgraded to a 12A from its original PG certificate - which is intriguing - yet otherwise seeming to represent no more than the dream factory's ability to generate lasting and profitable IP. The source was a 1981 picture book by Chris van Allsburg; the movie, all but Jurassic Park for kids, survived dismissive reviews to make $263m off a $65m budget. Something about it - maybe just that nonsense title - lodged in the popular consciousness: we soon got a funny 1999 episode of The Simpsons where Homer invoked that title while trying to stop animals rampaging through Springfield, a tardy sequel (2005's functional Zathura, directed by a pre-Marvel Jon Favreau, which was Jumanji but with K-Stew and astronauts), and then, after the commercial success of the pre-pandemic Jurassic Park reboot, a digital-era update starring The Rock and Jack Black. What's ironic is that the original now plays like a public information film on the dangers of IP. In an 1869-set prologue, we witness two young boys burying a mysterious suitcase on the outskirts of middle-American everytown Brantwood. Cut to: 1969, where bullied young Brantwooder Alan Parrish (Adam Hann-Byrd, Jodie Foster's Little Man Tate, and one of those child stars you feel compelled to look up to see what they're doing now) dusts himself off after his latest smackdown, and rather than go home to have his wounds cleaned by ma Patty Clarkson, heads into a construction site to unearth this cursed item, containing a colonial-era board game with unbounded supernatural powers. Cut to: 1995, where we watch Bebe Neuwirth installing her late brother's children (Kirsten Dunst and Bradley Pierce) in the old Parrish household, where the game's now been crammed in the back of a closet. Jumanji the game - like Jumanji the movie, like any other IP - is a Pandora's box; they will keep digging it up or out, damn the consequences.
In 2025, you can't help but notice how efficient this dig is: there's no fat whatsoever on that first act, not much more on the rest of it, and the whole comes in at a brisk 100 minutes. Now that it's passed into the realm of historical artefact, however, you also can't fail to notice how curious it all is, and that it keeps threatening to open the door to some very dark places indeed. (No wonder it's now a 12A.) What you remember, as Homer remembered, are the CG beasties, which are still sort of arresting, although clearly more time was spent on one impressively rendered lion than on anything else around it. (The monkeys are child's drawings, and one of the game's instructions is conspicuously misspelt: here's an early lesson in the time pressures that giant leaps forward in technology would put on filmmakers' shoulders.) What's just as apparent, however, is that this is Hollywood fumbling its way towards some discussion of childhood trauma, whether caused by indifferent or absent parents or indeed by some form of entertainment. The Parrish arc pushes the Back to the Future template in the far more troubling direction of its inspiration It's a Wonderful Life: what if (as per Robin Williams' older Alan) you returned to your hometown to find it irreparably changed, with industry closed down and your parents dead and buried, and the local authorities mistaking you for an itinerant? What if you were homeless in multiple senses of the word? Mum, dad: I don't like this film anymore. Mum? Dad?
Parrish won't go down as one of Williams' great roles, because - as was so often the case in the 1990s - the actor's not being asked to be funny so much as childlike, to find cheery ways of processing the loss he's experienced. He's childproofing his Fisher King routine, really, though he's good with Dunst and Pierce, conveying the threat the game poses to everyday life without coming across as a major loon. But he isn't the only one here who seems to be struggling. Not for nothing does Bonnie Hunt's Sarah, who's been posing as a psychic (to prey on others?), have her therapist on speed dial, and even the relatively well-adjusted Neuwirth - Lilith! - is heard to have a self-help tape on in the car. (We were two seasons into Frasier at this point, in the middle of a decade that started with What About Bob? and ended with Analyze This and The Sopranos: for American showbusiness, therapy was becoming a viable dramatic option.) Jumanji doesn't seem to realise this, or maybe somebody involved did realise this and started slowly backing away from it as you would from any lion, but its characters are a bunch of people with fucked-up childhoods - who in no way resemble showbiz kids, not even Pierce's Peter, transformed by the game into a cross between Michael Jackson and Bubbles - faced once more with terrifying animals (for which a therapist might read adults) smashing up the place and leaving any number of holes and broken homes in their wake. Is that what these many long years of continual IP renewal come down to, an attempt to make right, to regain control over something representing a period in our lives when we had none? If so, Jumanji is the codeword that seeks to put the genie - or any other form of disruption - back in its bottle.
Jumanji returns to cinemas nationwide from Friday.
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