According to the film’s production notes:
After their father (Tim Robbins) leaves for work, leaving them in the care of their older sister (Kristen Stewart), six year-old Danny (Jonah Bobo) and ten-year old Walter (Josh Hutcherson) either get on each other’s nerves or are totally bored.
When their bickering escalates and Walter starts chasing him, Danny hides in a dumbwaiter. But Walter surprises him, and in retaliation, lowers Danny into their dark, scary basement, where he discovers an old tattered metal board game, called Zathura. After trying unsuccessfully to get his brother to play the game with him, Danny starts to play on his own.
From his first move, Danny realises this is no ordinary board game. His spaceship marker moves by itself and when it lands on a space, a card is ejected, which reads: “Meteor shower, take evasive action.” The house is immediately pummelled from above by hot, molten meteors.
When Danny and Walter look up through the gaping hole in their roof, they discover, to their horror, that they have been propelled into deepest, darkest outer space. And they are not alone…
So begins an exhilarating, sometimes frightening, but always unpredictable adventure. Danny and Walter realise that unless they finish the game they’ll be trapped in outer space forever. With every turn, they confront one incredible obstacle after another: They accidentally put their sister Lisa into a deep cryonic sleep, are chased by a crazed, malfunctioning six-foot robot, rescue a stranded astronaut (Dax Shepard) and are besieged by lizard-like, carnivorous creatures called Zorgons.
With the help of the astronaut, Danny and Walter begin to put their petty fraternal differences aside, work together to overcome the obstacles they encounter and attempt to finish the game so they can go home.
But all their efforts may be in vain when they face their biggest challenge of all – a battle against an intense gravitational pull into the void of the dark planet Zathura.
Director Jon Favreau said: ‘When I first read the script, I was immediately taken by how sincere the depiction of the characters was. David (Koepp) and John (Kamps) preserved a great deal of the emotion and imagery of Chris’s book.
‘I wanted Zathura to work first and foremost on a visceral level, very much in the way Steven Spielberg’s early Amblin movies did. Films like E.T. and Close Encounters and George Lucas’s Star Wars movies are the kind of sci-fi stories I grew up loving, and that’s something I was eager to explore with this film. I also thought it would be fun to work with special effects, miniatures, robots, computer graphics – areas I haven’t had a chance to play with in the past. After working on Elf and having a small taste of that kind of filmmaking, Zathura seemed to be the next logical step for me to challenge myself and grow as a filmmaker.
‘I have two children now, I watch a lot of movies that are geared towards kids and this one really appealed to my sensibilities. As a filmmaker, a big part of your job is to put energy into getting a message out into the world that you believe in. I like stories that offer hope and films that have responsible themes. When you’re making a movie for young people, there should be a little aspirin in the apple sauce. There should be a nice message at the core.’
Esteemed film critic Roger Ebert noted: ‘What makes this fun is that Danny and Walter are obviously not going to get hurt. Alien fire blasts away whole chunks of their house, but never the chunks they’re in, and the giant lizards seem more preoccupied with overacting than with eating little boys. The young actors, Hutcherson and Bobo, bring an unaffected enthusiasm to their roles, fighting with each other like brothers even when threatened with roasting by a solar furnace. Their father, I should have mentioned, is played by Tim Robbins, although his role consists primarily of being absent. Kristen Stewart makes the most of the sister, Lisa’s, non-cryonic scenes. And then there is the character of the Astronaut (Dax Shepard), who materialises at a crucial point and helps shield the kids from intergalactic hazards. Lisa’s crush on the Astronaut becomes cringy after all is known.
‘Zathura lacks the undercurrents of archetypal menace and genuine emotion that informed The Polar Express, a true classic that is being re-released again this year. But it works gloriously as space opera. We’re going through a period right now in which every video game is being turned into a movie, resulting in cheerless exercises such as Doom, which mindlessly consists of aliens popping up and getting creamed. Zathura is based on a different kind of game, in which the heroes are not simply shooting at targets, but are actually surrounded by real events that they need to figure out. They are active heroes, not passive marksmen. Nobody even gets killed in Zathura. Well, depending on what happens to the lizards on the other side of the black hole.’