One of my all-time favorite books is Steven Gould’s Jumper. It’s a book about a kid who goes through some really rough times in his life… and discovers he can teleport, which doesn’t exactly simplify his situation. It’s a great novel, and the author really examines the science behind teleportation without ever explaining why, exactly, our hero can teleport. The sequel also rocks, by the way.
So, they’re making a movie. And they’ve completely changed, well, everything. It looks like our hero can teleport… but that may be just about the only thing the movie will have in common with the books. Even the logical reasoning behind the teleportation process is gone.
As I understand it, Gould has written a new Jumper novel to retrofit/shoehorn the movie into the book’s universe.
sigh
Well, the trailer looks like they kept a fair number of details from the book, like his photo references. The basic mechanism of the jumping is still the same, although the jumpscar business is new. They changed the circumstances of David’s first jump, possibly for rating reasons–that was pretty damn nasty. It looks a great deal more action-oriented than the book (despite the book’s substantial action quotient), but that’s probably to be expected.
The big changes are in who’s after him and why. Replacing the obsessive government agent with an obsessive witch-hunter (more or less) doesn’t really bother me too much. Large chunks of the background are completely new. To be fair, though, the background stuff doesn’t seem to necessarily contradict the original source material. It could be viewed as an expansion of it. It looks like they took the original scenario and asked some pertinent questions about it, then set out to answer them.
Ex:
Is David the only Jumper?
If so, what makes him special?
If not, given the rather spectacular things he does, what are the rest of them doing? Why don’t we see a pattern of events that points to large-scale Jumper activity worldwide?
On the whole, I’m willing to withhold judgment for now. I’ll wait until the movie is out before I pick it apart.
Well at least Samuel L. Jackson and Mannequin Skywalker are together again on-screen.