Based on the illustrated children's book by Jumanji creator Chris Van Allsburg, Zathura tells the nearly identical story of two brothers who discover a sci-fi board game tucked among the cobwebs in their creepy old basement. As soon as they start playing, their house rips free from its spot in the suburbs and goes hurtling off into space, where a new intergalactic calamity greets them with every turn.

There are defective robots to reprogram, slimy alien creatures to outsmart and stranded spacemen to rescue. If you step out the front door, you'd be floating somewhere just outside Tsouris 3. How cool is that? If I were still 7, Zathura would have me refastening my jaw and scrambling beneath my seat to relocate the eyes that'd just popped out of my head. It's that good. If there's any part of you that's still 7, Zathura will bring it out.

Don't believe me? As if those video-game-to-movie adaptations weren't bad enough, you're wary of a story where players take turns to advance the plot? Ah, but therein lies the beauty of Zathura: The setup is so simple that it gives the screenwriters infinite latitude to invent a rock-solid concept in which "winning" requires two brothers, ages 6 and 10, to work out their differences.

So there you have it: Van Allsburg's shameless sequel has become the ultimate delivery device for the domestic "can't we all just get along" story, with positive things to say about responsibility, sibling rivalry and coping with divorce, all of it framed in such a way that kids will never suspect (or mind) that they're being asked to eat their broccoli.

Let me turn your attention for a moment to screenwriter David Koepp's other mammoth 2005 sci-fi undertaking, War of the Worlds, in which that yucky family togetherness stuff kept getting in the way of the big picture. No offense to Dakota Fanning, whom I consider to be the Meryl Streep of child actors, but the two kids in Zathura are dynamite, too. You buy that they're brothers -- right down to their ear-piercing arguments -- and that's crucial.

Watching meteors rain down on the living room or gravity rip the books right off the shelf could get old fast, but Zathura works because we understand just how badly little Danny (Jonah Bobo) wants older brother Walter (Josh Hutcherson) to treat him as a peer, rather than a pest. Meanwhile, older sister Lisa (Kristen Stewart) spends the greater part of the movie as a ''teeny-bopsicle'' after Danny draws a cryogenic freeze card.

The other main character is the board game itself, an elaborate tin contraption with gears and levers and, quite possibly, a mind of its own. Director Jon Favreau insists on using old-school camera tricks over CG effects whenever possible, and everything the game conjures up -- from the retro metal robot to the bowels of an alien space ship -- looks exactly as it would in your imagination.

Favreau has the same intuitive sense for filmmaking we associate with a young Spielberg, crafting a family movie that's never precious, but feels good all the same. They simply don't make adventure movies like this anymore. In a generation desperate for its E.T., here's one extra-terrestrial experience you won't soon forget.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]