17 Years Later, Hayden Christensen’s Sci-Fi Thriller Finally Gets Its Due

Seventeen years later, Hayden Christensen is back in the conversation for Jumper. Not for the story, which is still a mixed bag, but for the teleportation work that a lot of VFX folks now point to as quietly excellent. If you remember thinking the jumps looked oddly real back in 2008, you were not imagining it.

"One of the best depictions of teleportation ever, I wish I liked anything else about it."

- Dracosfire7 (@Dracosfire7), Oct 22, 2025

Why VFX artists are suddenly nodding at Jumper

Corridor Crew took apart the Colosseum brawl between Christensen's jumper David Rice and Jamie Bell's Griffin and found a lot of clever problem-solving under the hood. The team didn’t lean on full CG doubles. Instead, they stacked the frame with multiple stunt performers who matched the actors, tracked their faces with dots, and then did face-replacement. In one shot, Jamie Bell shows up twice in the same frame while stunt work and compositing stitch it together. It is a very nerdy craft detail, and it sells the chaos in a way that still holds up.

The teleportation itself looks alive because they resisted the easy cheat: hard cutting. To keep it feeling like the jump is happening right now, they layered in little physical cues that your brain buys without thinking about it: wisps of displaced air and smoke, hair getting tugged by the pop, quick flashes of light that interact with the scene. The result is kinetic and tactile instead of cartoony, which is why people are rediscovering it now.

The movie around the effects

Jumper was directed by Doug Liman, with Christensen playing David Rice, a kid who discovers he can teleport and ends up in a fight with Paladins, a religious group obsessed with wiping out people like him. Back in 2008 it got steamrolled by bigger releases and took its lumps for a rushed plot, an anticlimax, and straying from the source material. But the box office was solid, and the visuals aged better than the reputation.

The spin-off you might have missed

Years later, the world of Jumper resurfaced as Impulse on YouTube Premium in 2018. It follows a new lead, Henrietta, and shifts the focus to the psychological and emotional fallout of having jumping abilities. It ran for two seasons before getting canceled, but it digs into the idea from a fresh angle.

• Title: Jumper (2008), directed by Doug Liman; stars Hayden Christensen (David Rice) and Jamie Bell (Griffin)
• Premise: A teleporter tangles with Paladins, a religious order hunting people with his ability
• VFX highlights: Face-replacement over stunt performers (not full CG doubles); no hard cuts; smoke, hair, and light cues to sell real-time teleportation
• Box office (via The Numbers): $222 million worldwide
• Scores: Rotten Tomatoes 15% critics | 44% audience; IMDb 6.1/10
• Spin-off: Impulse (YouTube Premium, 2018), two seasons, canceled; centers on Henrietta and the emotional cost of jumping
• Where to watch: Jumper is available to rent or buy on Apple TV+; Impulse season 1 streams on YouTube Premium in the U.S.

So yeah, the story stumbles, but the teleportation? Still some of the cleanest, most convincing work of its kind. If you wrote Jumper off back then, it might be worth a rewatch just to see how much the trickery still clicks.