soph (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophia_sol) wrote2019-01-01 09:36 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2019-01-01 09:36 pm
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Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)
A while back ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
postmodernismruinedme and her partner recommended the movie "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" to me and I am happy to report that it lives up to everything I was promised.
In this movie, four teenagers (the jock, the nerd boy, the bluestocking, the popular girl) accidentally get pulled into the world of a video game! To escape the game our group of main characters, none of whom really like each other to begin with, must win the game's objectives through the power of teamwork!!
To make things more complicated, each character ends up in the body of an in-game avatar that is very different from their real life self. The jock ends up in the body of the sidekick zoologist, the nerd ends up in the body of the heroic and muscular team lead, the bluestocking ends up in the body of the sexy fighter girl, and the popular girl ends up in the body of a pudgy middle aged male cartographer. They are all varyingly uncomfortable with this, and the cross-gender avatar of the popular girl is handled remarkably well for a mainstream movie. (Jack Black truly IS Bethany and I was duly impressed.)
This movie is funny and charming and about TEAMWORK and FRIENDSHIP and LEARNING TO RECOGNIZE YOUR STRENGTHS.
The two female characters have a really frank conversation early in the movie about why they don't like each other, and then after that they're just....friends who support each other and accept each other! They end up having the least fraught relationship of any of the characters! I was so pleased with this.
I was also really intrigued by the relationships of each of the characters with the bodies they ended up in. It's differently challenging for all of them, and Bethany (the image-obsessed popular girl who's put in a male avatar) honestly handles it the best of all of them. She's just unapologetically herself and for the most part doesn't let herself get awkwarded out by how she would be perceived in this other body.
Meanwhile Fridge (the jock) clearly feels emasculated by the very-non-jock body he ends up in. And Spencer (the nerd boy) seems to enjoy being in the body of Dwayne The Rock Johnson but also feels disconnected from the body: he knows it's not him, and admires it in a way that's clearly seeing the body from the outside rather than truly inhabiting it. And Martha (the bluestocking) has no clue how to handle the sexy persona she's been put into and hates how naked she feels in her costume.
So it was all a really interesting exploration of embodiment and what it means to feel at home in your body and how much is your body really you versus just being the vessel you're housed in. While still being a fun ridiculous actiony movie!
When I finished the movie, I of course immediately went to AO3 and was pleasantly surprised that there's actually more than just a couple extant fics in the fandom. So I was able to find a number of fics I enjoyed! HOWEVER, what I ended the movie wanting most of all was something that I only found a very tiny amount of in one short fic.
Okay so in the movie, although the four main characters are all from the present day, 20 years ago another kid, Alex, got sucked into the video game, and he's been living in the game ever since, unable to escape since he didn't have team members with complementary skills to back him up in winning the game. At the end of the movie when they all beat the game, Alex is sent back to his original time in the 1990's. So the four main characters when they return to their real life, meet an Alex who's twenty years older than them, twenty years older than the teen they remember meeting in the game. Alex is a grown-up, a parent with two kids, a person clearly in a very different life stage than the others but who still remembers the four of them very fondly.
So what I want is the Extremely Awkward Intergenerational Friendship fic, where the five of them learn how to be in each other's lives even though they're no longer all peers. I found one very short fic (Reset) that does a little about this with just Bethany and Alex, which is a particularly interesting part of the dynamic since Bethany and Alex were clearly into each other when they knew each other in the game, and transmuting that interest into something more platonic would I'm sure be complicated. But I want more!!! ALAS.
In this movie, four teenagers (the jock, the nerd boy, the bluestocking, the popular girl) accidentally get pulled into the world of a video game! To escape the game our group of main characters, none of whom really like each other to begin with, must win the game's objectives through the power of teamwork!!
To make things more complicated, each character ends up in the body of an in-game avatar that is very different from their real life self. The jock ends up in the body of the sidekick zoologist, the nerd ends up in the body of the heroic and muscular team lead, the bluestocking ends up in the body of the sexy fighter girl, and the popular girl ends up in the body of a pudgy middle aged male cartographer. They are all varyingly uncomfortable with this, and the cross-gender avatar of the popular girl is handled remarkably well for a mainstream movie. (Jack Black truly IS Bethany and I was duly impressed.)
This movie is funny and charming and about TEAMWORK and FRIENDSHIP and LEARNING TO RECOGNIZE YOUR STRENGTHS.
The two female characters have a really frank conversation early in the movie about why they don't like each other, and then after that they're just....friends who support each other and accept each other! They end up having the least fraught relationship of any of the characters! I was so pleased with this.
I was also really intrigued by the relationships of each of the characters with the bodies they ended up in. It's differently challenging for all of them, and Bethany (the image-obsessed popular girl who's put in a male avatar) honestly handles it the best of all of them. She's just unapologetically herself and for the most part doesn't let herself get awkwarded out by how she would be perceived in this other body.
Meanwhile Fridge (the jock) clearly feels emasculated by the very-non-jock body he ends up in. And Spencer (the nerd boy) seems to enjoy being in the body of Dwayne The Rock Johnson but also feels disconnected from the body: he knows it's not him, and admires it in a way that's clearly seeing the body from the outside rather than truly inhabiting it. And Martha (the bluestocking) has no clue how to handle the sexy persona she's been put into and hates how naked she feels in her costume.
So it was all a really interesting exploration of embodiment and what it means to feel at home in your body and how much is your body really you versus just being the vessel you're housed in. While still being a fun ridiculous actiony movie!
When I finished the movie, I of course immediately went to AO3 and was pleasantly surprised that there's actually more than just a couple extant fics in the fandom. So I was able to find a number of fics I enjoyed! HOWEVER, what I ended the movie wanting most of all was something that I only found a very tiny amount of in one short fic.
Okay so in the movie, although the four main characters are all from the present day, 20 years ago another kid, Alex, got sucked into the video game, and he's been living in the game ever since, unable to escape since he didn't have team members with complementary skills to back him up in winning the game. At the end of the movie when they all beat the game, Alex is sent back to his original time in the 1990's. So the four main characters when they return to their real life, meet an Alex who's twenty years older than them, twenty years older than the teen they remember meeting in the game. Alex is a grown-up, a parent with two kids, a person clearly in a very different life stage than the others but who still remembers the four of them very fondly.
So what I want is the Extremely Awkward Intergenerational Friendship fic, where the five of them learn how to be in each other's lives even though they're no longer all peers. I found one very short fic (Reset) that does a little about this with just Bethany and Alex, which is a particularly interesting part of the dynamic since Bethany and Alex were clearly into each other when they knew each other in the game, and transmuting that interest into something more platonic would I'm sure be complicated. But I want more!!! ALAS.
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(I still have some complicated thoughts and feelings about how the film puts a white Jewish kid in the body of Dwayne The Rock Johnson so that he can learn self-empowerment, and puts a black kid in the body of Kevin Hart so that he can learn to ... accept a more sidekick role? If I could make one major plot change to the film, I'd have changed Fridge's arc so that it's his idea to strategically self-sacrifice/reset, and the emphasis is much more on him learning to adapt his football skills to become team strategist.)
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And yeah, Fridge's storyline is definitely the least well done of all of them. I was apparently working too hard at Not Thinking About It during the movie watch but now that you mention it I'm like, oh, ouch. I can see what they were trying to go for with Fridge, having him learn to see value in things he can do that aren't just physical prowess. But that arc would have been much better served if the movie had done what you suggest and I wish that's how things had happened, sigh.
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