What Parents Should Know
Parents should know that the movie begins with typical tensions, resentments, and competitions between two brothers, aged six and 10. Their father is divorced and their teenaged sister is distracted by her interest in boys and parties. The film includes scary music, scary sound effects (crashes, explosions, alien-monster growls), and some images of space-aliens and a big robot attacking the boys that might be frightening for younger viewers. Boys use some obnoxious language ("d--k," "screwed") and violence against the aliens to save themselves.

Families can discuss the relationship between the two brothers: how do they learn to appreciate and take care of one another? How do Lisa or their father fit into or affect the brothers' relationship? How does the absent mother (never seen on screen, though she arrives to pick them up in a car) figure into the family tensions?

Common Sense Media Review
ZATHURA: A SPACE ADVENTURE is a movie most likely to appeal to elementary-school boys. By playing a board game, six-year-old Danny (Jonah Bobo) essentially turns his house into a space ship, floating through the starry sky somewhere near Saturn, buffeted by the occasional meteor shower or malevolent alien. That he's accompanied by his 10-year-old brother Walter (Josh Hutcherson) complicates and helps to complete the voyage. This is a tale of brotherly bonding.

It doesn't start out that way. Danny's feeling rather shut out by Walter, who in turn feels besieged by the demands of a sibling who dotes on him. Older and wiser and increasingly impatient. Walter just wants to be left alone, especially as he's also feeling abandoned by dad (Tim Robbins), working overtime to pay for two homes (he's recently divorced). The boys find distraction in "Zathura," a circa-'50s board game in the basement, when dad goes to the office and leaves them in the care of their teenaged sister Lisa (Kristen Stewart). Her resentment of the assignment could not be more visible, as she heads back to bed as soon as dad's out the door.

Like the game in Jumanji, another movie based on a children's book by Chris Van Allsburg (also the literary source for Polar Express), this one helps the siblings to work out their conflicts "metaphorically," here by encounters with hostile monsters, a deranged robot, and a "stranded astronaut" (Dax Shepard). Once they begin the game, the rules assert, Danny and Walter are unable to stop until they "finish," meaning that they need to find the reason they're playing, and, of course, reconcile with one another.

Their adventures are as episodic as the board game scenario suggests: each boy takes his turn. While they're fighting off sequential imminent disasters, Danny and Walter don't realize that they set off some other mechanism that turns Lisa's bedroom into a deep freeze -- she remains literally immobilized for the most of the film's running time. When she does thaw, she's granted a limited gamut of roles, from screaming victim to gushy girl with a crush to action-heroic savior.

But as Jon Favreau's movie is most interested in the boys' relationship, Lisa is best described as plot device, convenient witness, and occasional instigator for their realizations and efforts. In this, she's aided by the astronaut, who shows up during Danny's turn (he's instructed to rescue this stranger and then attached to the astronaut, who identifies Danny as the one who "spun me"). This provides the younger boy with an eventual conflict, as the astronaut and Walter make different demands. Danny eventually comes to realize that Walter is his brother, no matter how ugly he's been to Danny in the past, and that makes him, as the astronaut observes, "all you have."

Families who like this movie might also enjoy Jumanji, Polar Express, SpaceCamp, or WarGames.