I took some crap in comments on my film review for reviewing the film’s morality rather than the film, which in part makes me think I expressed myself poorly. It isn’t that the film is morally objectionable and should be avoided because it teaches kids bad values, and shame shame, won’t someone please think of the children. It’s more that the film is brainless and childish and not very interesting. Its Davy is a bratty kid who storms around breaking laws not for any particular reason, but just because he can. The book gets into his head and justifies his actions; the film doesn’t give a shit why he does what he does. He has a super power, dammit, and that alone justifies any behavior, both to the character and to the film, which never reaches beyond or even examines his superficial morality. (Which I think he really sums up in the film’s first scene, when he tells the audience how he used to be “a normal person, a chump, just like you.”) It isn’t important that he lies to Millie constantly in order to impress her and get her into the sack: What’s important is that he gets her into the sack. Cool! It isn’t important that he has ridiculous amounts of money, yet when he wants to go surfing, he uses his power to steal a wetsuit and a surfboard, then teleports to someplace with some good waves, then teleports out again when he gets in over his head, leaving the stolen board behind. Wicked, man! The film doesn’t care why he does anything: It’s just about the action.
Which is fine, except when the paladins show up, led by Roland (Samuel L. Jackson), and suddenly the audience is supposed to have some sort of stake in the proceedings. Except that we can’t care about Davy, because we don’t know anything about him, except that he’s a spoiled brat. And we can’t root for Roland, because we don’t know a damn thing about him, either, except that he kills brats like Davy, apparently for religious reasons. So the film doesn’t really give the audience a stake in anything. So who cares who wins when they start fighting?
Even where the film actually follows the book, it changes everything it can possibly change, in ways that pretty much make Davy more of a meathead. To wit:
• When book-Davy first teleports to escape his father, he instinctively teleports to his local library, his sanctuary where he shuts out the outside world. Later in the book, he returns there frequently for research and reading, because he still associates it with his few happy memories of childhood. When film-Davy (whose dad is sorta scary, but is never seen beating him) first gets himself into danger by falling into a frozen river, he also instinctively teleports to the library—and wrecks a huge swath of it by accidentally bringing along a flood of water. Later, he returns again, and this time, he completely destroys the place in the process. This is a product of the film’s flashy aesthetic, not some kind of cruel anti-library message. But as a book-lover, it’s hard not to be annoyed at the guy who thoughtlessly flattens the local library. Maybe some vague show of regret is too much to ask for, especially in an action movie, but still, it just feels like another sign of the movie’s “Nothing and no one is important but me” mentality. Not to mention its dunderheaded lack of interest in stupid ol’ book-learnin’.
• Book-Davy robs a bank because he has to: He has no other means of support. But after the one theft, he’s done—he lives relatively conservatively off the money, getting himself a small apartment and mostly buying books. And he feels guilty as hell about it. And when he takes other things, like the construction materials he teleports into the wilderness for his hideaway, he leaves cash to pay for the stuff. And in Reflex, it comes out that once he did start earning money, while he couldn’t confess to the crime and pay back the bank, he donated an equivalent amount of honestly earned money to charity as a compensatory measure. Basically, there's a big ol' "Don't steal, kids, it's wrong" morality message there.
Presumably film-Davy robs that first bank for the same reason, but immediately afterward, the film jumps forward eight years, and it rapidly becomes clear that a) he’s still robbing banks, given that he has a massive closet packed with shrink-wrapped flats of cash and huge sacks of money, and b) he’s blowing the money on whatever strikes his fancy, given his massive high-rise home full of motorcycles and high-tech toys. And even so, he still uses his power to steal random objects. And to add to that, he’s so dumb, he’s leaving an IOU at the site of every robbery—when Roland shows up to kill Davy’s lame ass, he has a pile of “I’ll totally pay this back” notes from the sites of Davy's crimes. This detail baffles the hell out of me. Clearly Davy isn’t going to pay the money back—he’s stolen way, way more than he needs, presumably for fun or to show off. So why is he leaving evidence behind, in his own handwriting, yet? Is he being disingenuous? Does he believe he’s actually going to pay the money back? Or is he just being a smug dick?
• Finally, book-Davy meets Millie at a show, and starts pursuing her bit by bit. She’s part of his new life, his escaped life, his adult life. And she’s actually stronger and more principled than he is; she sees his damage, and talks to him about it, and tries to help him get over it. Film-Davy knows Millie from childhood. He wanted her as a kid, he wanted her as an adolescent, he wants her as a grown-up. She’s just another sign of his own arrested development, his inability to make mature connections. In this clip, he sums it up with the line “It was always you. Ever since we were 5.”:
It doesn’t help that film-Millie is kind of a bimbo, easily bowled over by film-Davy’s lies and money and power. By the end of the film, in spite of him lying to her, endangering the hell out of her, and destroying her life, she’s draped over his arm, basically as another accessory that he accumulates to show how awesome he is.
Morality aside, there’s obviously a broad tonal difference between the book and the film. The book, as I’ve said, is methodical, sometimes almost plodding, in laying out the step-by-step procedures of making a life in a new city, or developing an information network that will help stop terrorist attacks. The movie is broad and spastic, fast-forwarding past Davy’s development from a scared kid to an overconfident lout played by Hayden Christensen. (Yes, he’s about as stiff and uninteresting as he was in the Star Wars prequel films. While he never tells Millie she’s soft and smooth and not at all like sand, his relationship with her is about like his relationship with Padme in Attack Of The Clones: clumsy and glowering and grunty.) And the movie’s skip-to-the-action aesthetic leaves a bunch of massive logical holes in its wake. For instance, it’s never really clear what the paladins believe, or why, or where they came from, or how they find jumpers. It’s also never clear why Davy’s teleports sometimes barely disturb the papers in the room he’s leaving, and sometimes smash walls to powder.
These things are actually cleared up elsewhere, in stories that are more interesting than the movie by a good bit. The future life of book-Davy is also laid out in an unrelated book. Some brief summaries of the other Jumper-related books out there:
• Reflex is the sequel to Jumper, and has nothing to do with the film universe: It’s about Davy as a grown-up, now married and with most, but not all, of his abuse issues behind him. In this book, he’s captured by some individuals who’ve learned about some of the limitations of his powers, and use them to control him and begin conditioning him. Like Jumper, it’s methodical and detailed, walking through the steps of what they do to him and what the results are. That’s about half the book; the other involves Millie trying to figure out what happened to him, and trying to save him. It’s more of a traditional thriller than Jumper, and less of a young-adult book. I’d recommend it. In some ways, I think it’s a better book than Jumper—more balanced, better-written throughout—though I wouldn’t recommend reading it without reading Jumper first.
• Jumper: Griffin’s Story is a book Gould wrote as a prequel to the movie, and in the movie universe rather than the universe of his original, paladin-free Jumper. It’s the backstory of Griffin, the experienced jumper played in the film by Jamie Bell. And it reads more than a little like a retread of Jumper. Griffin isn’t abused and doesn’t have the same issues, and he’s much younger than Davy, but he’s forced out of his home when paladins come after him and kill his family, and he goes through much of the same steps in escaping his old life, learning about his powers, and gradually building himself a home. This book does a much better job than the film of showing why the paladins are the bad guys—ruthless people with way too much power who will casually kill anyone to achieve their goals. And it explains a lot more about the variables of jumping—how sloppy or sudden or unplanned or emotional jumps disturb the area and bring along more detritus than controlled ones, for instance. It also explains a lot about the paladins’ methodology—some of them can sense teleportation, and use it to track their prey. This one’s inessential, though, except for people who really enjoyed the movie and want to explore the world at length. Or people who think the movie looks dumb, but enjoyed Gould’s other work and would like a more nuanced, Gould-flavored look at the world of the film.
• Jumper: Jumpscars is a tie-in graphic novel not written by Gould, from the perspective of a newbie paladin learning why jumpers are bad and need to be killed. And it makes some pretty good arguments, actually, especially in light of the film. It’s presented more as a tragedy than a primer, but it’s an interesting look at the other side of the equation, and it’s far more nuanced than the film’s “God wants you to die!” paladin perspective.
One more thing about the film: It really wants to be a superhero comic. It underlines this a lot, with Davy repeatedly telling Griffin that their story is like a Marvel Team-Up arc, where two unrelated superheroes briefly hang out and work together. The metaphor comes up several times. But Davy isn’t a hero, or even an anti-hero. He’s a supervillain, and he just doesn’t know it. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll actually go all the way into villainy or heroism in the next movie, and become an actual interesting character. I’m not holding my breath, because it doesn’t seem likely. But since the film goes out of its way to set up a sequel by throwing in irrelevant unresolved plot threads, then hitting viewers over the head with them at the end of the film, and since the movie’s fairly close to making back its production budget after a week in theaters, I think it’s fairly likely that we’ll be seeing Jumper 2: The Jumping Boogaloo at some point in the future. Hopefully it’ll at least make the protagonist someone worth caring about, one way or the other.
Next time on Book Vs. Film:
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