This post in sponsored by Amazon Prime. All opinion and thoughts are my own.
Last Friday we got the chance to attend an early showing of ‘Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle’ with Amazon Prime (you guys probably saw the stories from the night, including our silly boomerangs haha). I am a MASSIVE Amazon Prime fan, it’s worth every.single.penny. Having the ability to order same day delivery makes my life a LOT easier, especially since Big C travels so much – I order everything from dog food to paper towels to home decor goodies for our shoots…not to mention that we get a ton of shows that I can stream for Little C to watch as a Prime member. SO, if you aren’t a Prime member I would seriously consider signing up (and no, this isn’t a plug for Prime, this is just my honest to goodness evaluation of the value that Prime offers). Okay off my Prime rant, back to the movie.
Lucky for me, Big C was in town for 24-hours in between work trips so I got to take him along as my date (keep reading for some of our fabulous photos from the night). First of all, huge kudos to the AMC theater at Barton Creek – the chairs recline electronically and are super big and comfy! Maybe I need to go to more movies and this is totally common place (and is going to make me sound both old and lame), but I think that this was the first time that I had ever been to a theater where my seat reclined in that manner, and I loved it; next time I’m wearing my pj’s and bringing a blanket.
Now before we get into the movie, a little share about the night. The setup that Amazon Prime had was adorable, a lounge complete with chairs and a zebra skin rug, and a super cute spot to take photos that had all sorts of props from a stuffed cheetah to straw safari hats, binoculars, and miniature stuffed monkeys. They had a professional photog shooting snaps, so a big thanks for sharing the photos for this blog post! As you can see, we took our job shooting photos VERY seriously. I was really feeling ‘The Britney’ with the anaconda.
Along with the lounge, they had info set up about Prime and I scored an Echo Dot which I’m stoked to try out (they’re currently 40% off on Amazon Prime at just $30 and a perfect stocking stuffer)! If you aren’t familiar with the Dot, it’s essentially a hands-free device that uses Alexa to play music, control smart home devices, make calls, send and receive messages, provide information, read the news, set alarms, read audiobooks from Audible, and more. Super cool, right? ANYWAYS. Back to the movie!
In all honesty, at first, I wasn’t exactly sure what to think about a remake of Jumanji – after all, the great Robin Williams is king as far as I’m concerned and the movie was magical when I was younger (I found out that the film is actually in part a tribute to him, which is wonderful). The great thing is that this is not like a sequel in the sense that it compounds on the first movie, it’s completely different from the first one (and in a good way). It’s a brand-new cast and a similar but more 21st century story line – essentially the characters are all gamers, with a set number of lives that can be used before they are trapped in the game forever; clever concept and super relatable especially for all of our gamers out there!
The cinematography is beautiful, the jungle is lush and dense (it was filmed in Hawaii!) and totally adds to the magic of the movie. Even the CGI animals (some massive hippos, rhinos, etc.) were well done and believable which I appreciated, because sometimes CGI can come off really fake, and canned…and makes me seriously want to plan a vacation to the Big Island at some point soon!
The casting for Jumanji is also fantastic. I adore The Rock – I’m totally dating myself throughout this entire post but I remember back when he was on WWE and his saying was “Can you smell what The Rock is cooking?” Kevin Hart is also hilarious, and Jack Black is killer. Even Nick Jonas makes an appearance. They definitely delivered on a star-studded cast! The movie itself had both Big C and I close to tears at times from laughing, the actors really are perfectly suited to their characters – truly they did an awesome job putting together a cast and script that was funny and still totally family-friendly. It would be a perfect Christmas day movie to go to with the fam – we are thinking of going again and taking Little C along with; there is definitely a childlike innocence to the movie that made me feel like a kid again!
Are you guys going to go see it, or have you already? I would love to hear about your thoughts!!
