Trailer
Plot summary
Walter and Danny are brothers, and neither gets along with the other or with their teenage sister Lisa. When their father leaves for work, the boys stay in Lisa's care. Danny discovers an old board game, Zathura, in the basement, and his first turn produces a card warning of a meteor shower. After the meteors strike the house, Walter and Danny see that the game has set the house adrift in outer space. Lisa takes the darkened sky as a sign that she overslept, and she is frozen in cryonic sleep before she can go out. The brothers work out that finishing the game is the only way back home.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Zathura: A Space Adventure (2005)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Jon Favreau knew Dax Shepard mainly as a host of the prank show Punk'd, but cast him after seeing Mike Judge use him in Idiocracy and learning of his background doing improv with the Groundlings, the same troupe that produced Will Ferrell.
- Favreau insisted on building real spaceships and a physical robot and having Stan Winston construct practical Zorgon creatures instead of using CGI, and actor Dax Shepard said he would have turned the film down if the effects had been computer-generated.
- Stan Winston Studios built a full life-size frozen model of Kristen Stewart by scanning her down to the freckles on her arm; Stewart called the arduous process an incredible experience, comparing the finished model to having a twin.
- For the film's most complicated shot, the entire house set was mounted on a gimbal 30 feet off the ground that could tilt close to 40 degrees to simulate the pull of a planet's gravity, with cast and crew secured by cables and harnesses.
