MOVIES- Jumper

Jumper seems, on the surface, to be an uninspired fantasy that’s part Jaunting from Bester’s The Stars My Destination and part attractive young people doing bad line readings. The plot has the same relationship to reason that psychoteleportation has to physics and Haden Christensen has to acting. (I can’t wait to see him try to wrap his high school play delivery around William Gibson’s technobabble.) The movie is only interesting if you consider “jumping” as a metaphor for epilepsy which during the middle ages was thought of by religious folk as being possessed by devils. That this is the subtext of the movie is further evidenced by how much time the screen is taken up by bright flashing lights, loud noises, and that apparently only epileptics in the midst of seizures were employed as camera operators.