>>32591I am reasonably sure that Jumanji is a Jordan B. Peterson kind of movie for Generation X latchkey boys that only resonates with that specific slice of time.
The synopsis:
A little boy whose well-to-do family doesn't quite make time for him lets him play games with his childhood friend girl.
However, the boy gets too into this game and is stuck living inside this childhood experience in the attic for the next several decades while the girl gets psychologically alienated by it and becomes obsessed with a completely opposite kind of escapism-into-adulthood. Her misrememberance of Alan as having a particularly tragic childhood even leads to a widespread belief that Alan's father molested and murdered him, referencing gen x's childhood culture being filled with wildly incorrect stories of recovered memories which made it seem like there was any sort of degree of equality of childhood abuse and trauma between young girls and young boys.
Alan is forced to come to some degree of understanding that the world changed around him while he was stuck in a perpetual childhood and that he neither understands nor can navigate the adulthood that developed around his childhood home. Elements of his childhood fantasy keep intruding into life, somehow, or made by his mind to seem as though they are intruding. These fantasies serve primarily as obstacles but they are often useful obstacles in forcing Alan to adapt to a dreary reality in familiar terms, such as the real situation of a surrogate son Alan is forced by circumstance to care for being made to regress to a familiar jungle animal to drive home the real helplessness, dependence and power imbalance in that relationship since previously Alan only understood the child as a peer and thought "well I was taking care of myself as a latchkey in the harsh jungles of jumanji at that age why is this thumbsucker so pathetic."
Eventually a harsh dark shadow patriarchal figure who is played by the same actor as Alan's father (yes I didn't see this at first either, Jonathan Hyde is credited as both Van Pelt and Sam Parrish) crosses the boundary from fantasy to reality and it is only at the moment that Alan mans up sufficiently to earn the shadow-father's approval that Alan is able to win the game. Winning the game entails as a reward that Alan is able to advance from childhood into adolescence as a biological teenager instead of persisting as a mixed up child-man who'd probably never be fully employable and who would never have a stable adult relationship since we can all tell neither he nor his psychic con artist childhood girlfriend can be the rock at the foundation of a real romance.
Overall I rate it a JBP/10.
