Headscratchers / Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Venom

• What would happen if a character besides Ruby got bitten by a venomous snake? It’s established that characters can be killed in-game by dangerous animals the usual way, and the mamba at the bazaar is treated as a legitimate threat. Is everyone else immune to venom? Or would it have the same effect on any character, in which case, how is it Ruby’s weakness specifically?
  • It being Ruby's weakness probably meant ANY poison was going to kill her, not just actually lethal ones. Also, the snake bite probably wouldn't have killed her that fast, if it wasn't her weakness.
  • Given that it's a video game, being poisoned would probably set a timer running, with the character having a short period in which to take an antidote that's nearby and/or in Mouse's backpack. But in Ruby's specific case, the timer only runs for a second or so: too brief to take an antidote even if it were handy.

Brantford and the Parrishes

• Assuming the school's name being "Brantford High School" means the film takes place in Brantford, New Hampshire — nobody, especially Alex, noticed that the guy who built the tree house had the same name as the CEO of the town's biggest employer? Everyone knew the Parrishes, and the shoe company probably didn't go under between 1995 and 1996.
  • From the looks of it, young Alex was a bit of a punk and a rocker, so he probably didn't really think much about the Parrishes.
  • Alex already had enough time to digest the fact by the time he had his first Jumanji scene. It's unclear what happened to the Parrishes during the years Alex spent in Jumanji, and there's the possibility the others were too concerned with their own predicament to wonder if it was one of those Parrishes or not.
  • Nothing happened to the Parrishes. When Alan and Sarah first started Jumanji, it was 1969 and Alan got out in 1995. And they beat Jumanji and went back to 1969 then to 1995 normally. One year after in 1996, Jumanji was found by Alex's father and the rest is history.
  • Even if any of them recognized the name, there's no reason they'd have concluded that the previous jungle-dweller was that Alan Parrish. None of this film's characters suspect that the game sends its winners back to the date on which they'd initially started playing until Alex has it happen to him. So far as they know, there's no way that the same man could've been living in Jumanji for years and simultaneously running his family's shoe company.
• On that note, how does Alan's tree house still even exist? If Alan returned to 1969 at the end of the first film, before he even started playing the game, why is his tree house still intact if he never entered Jumanji in the new timeline?
  • Just because the real world reverted doesn't mean the game jungle did. The game probably retains a memory of previous play sessions, if only to ensure that it won't re-use the same threat twice.

Game realism

• The land of Jumanji now operates on video game logic, with levels, NPCs, cutscenes, player avatars, a limited number of lives, and characters being given varied strengths and weaknesses. Yet in spite of all this... the players still need to pee?
  • Presumably it's a consequence of them having their real physical bodies taken into the game world. Plus Jumanji existed before all the video game aspects to it did, so it seems more like the video game logic was added onto an existing magical (yet real) world, without taking away all the real-world aspects (like having to eat, being able to die for real and such).
  • We already knew that people had to relieve themselves in Jumanji, because of Alan's "no more banana leaves" crack in the original film. Grafting a few video game tropes onto the setting isn't going to change that, as video game logic simply ignores the subject rather than explicitly excluding it.

Time clone Jumanji

• Are there two Jumanjis now? Once the teenagers win, they're released back into 2016 and smash the game console (but leave the cartridge intact). But Alex is sent back to 1996, where he also had the game console hooked up to his television, not to mention the case for the board game in his room. We never do find out what happened to it. If he ultimately ended up giving the console to the school for donation, knowing what it was capable of... that's kind of a dick move.
  • Jumanji seems to not really be all that restricted by the normal rules of space and time. It's possible that when Alex was sent back to the past, he found that the Jumanji game was gone, having brought itself into the future to ensure that it was still played by the other four teens despite the time paradox it had created.
  • Maybe Alex got out and realized the other four needed to play for him to stay, so he donated the game to the school so it stayed in storage for them to find later, thus creating a stable time loop.
  • Jumanji even seems to be able to change its own rules between games. Remember that the Jumanji cartridge allowed five players to choose from. And Alex was able to start playing the game as a single player, with no indication there would be a second player, but that unfinished single-player game was turned into a multi-player game when the other kids picked up the controllers. On top of everything else, Alex only spent a few months in the game, while Alan spent 26 years in it. It's possible that the game, being sentient, doesn't mind whether it wins or loses as long as it is played, and tweaked the rules to allow this since Alex wasn't showing any signs of moving on alone.
  • Alex was excited to see the other players in the marketplace, stating he didn't believe it at first, so the remaining 4 characters were always supposed to be a part of the game and were always needed to complete it. Alex was also inside of Jumanji for 20 years, but only thought it was a few months because time passes differently in the game's world.
  • Time may pass differently, or it may not pass at all when someone stops trying to progress, effectively being on pause.
  • Or, for the simplest explanation of all, Alex hid the game in his family's attic or basement after his return, figuring that was sufficient to keep anyone else from playing it and getting trapped. Decades later, his father finds it gathering dust and donates it to the school, unaware that it's a time-bomb waiting to go off again.

Alex and the gem

• How did Alex (Seaplane) manage to stay in Jumanji for that long on his own? Not in terms of survival, as that's explained, but if he had already started a game, shouldn't he have been in possession of the gem? He remarks that he had already completed the levels leading up to "the Transportation Shed" and the only way to pass the first level (escaping the hippos) is to leave in Nigel's jeep, where he gives up the jewel. It's possible that Nigel only drove Seaplane because he needs to get the jewel to Dr. Smolder Bravestone, but how did Alex navigate that far through the game without the map (Shelly Oberon is the only one who can read it)?
  • It may be that Nigel only gives the gem to Doctor Smolder Bravestone rather than to the players as a whole, and Alex could have made it to that point of the game simply by improvising and asking other NPCs for help or advice.
  • It's a stretch, but Alex would have chosen single-player mode (pretty much the only mode for such a game in 1996). When the others started playing, he was shifted to the multi-player version.
  • Actually that's not a stretch - lots of the older games allowed a multi-player mode to kick in automatically if you just picked up the second controller and pressed Start.

Lives

• In most video games, if an indicator says you have three lives, it technically means you have four. You'd play the game with lives to spare and then once all three lives are lost, you'd be able to play the level with no spare lives, meaning you can't respawn after you die. I say this because in the film, it's unclear if having one life left means you have one spare life or one life period. Sure, Alex starts fading after being bitten by the mosquito, but we never see if he'd respawn. Furthermore, Spencer should at least be aware that that's how most video games function, though it's understandable if he wouldn't want to test it.
  • Conservation of detail. While that's true, a lot of older games, particularly around the Atari age, didn't have that, and when your lives hit zero that was it. Yes, they could have had a discussion about that, but it would just bog down the story without adding anything.

Fearless

• The "strengths" of each character do directly affect each of them, like how Fridge can report animal facts and Martha can dance-fight perfectly, but one of Spencer's strengths is "fearless," yet twice he gets scared by small animals in the game. This even costs him a life later on because in "the Defenders" level, a small animal scares him and causes him to fall out of a tree, where he's then mauled by a jaguar.
  • Some of the "strengths" of a character seem to have to be actively/intentionally accessed in order to be used. Like how Spencer is easily killed by Fridge because he was not ready for combat.
  • Another possibility is that the game was punishing Spencer for going out of bounds/doing the wrong thing, removing his "fearless" trait so that he would lose a life (much as how taking the wrong route in a game can result in a automatic loss of life regardless of your character's abilities).
  • Fridge Brilliance: Fear doesn't actually seem to incapacitate Spencer much, when it's fear of things that the game intends to be regarded as dangerous. He doesn't flinch when he walks the plank over the crocodiles, or when he's punching thugs through walls and catching knives or snakes bare-handed. It's when he's confronted by things that are supposed to be non-threatening, like small background wildlife, that he freaks out the most; when the threats are genuine, he bitches about being scared more than he actually fails because of it.

NPC patrols

• Alex says that when he initially attempted to complete the "Transportation Shed" level, he waited until the guards left, but the guards are NPCs (they say the same thing over and over when Martha tries to flirt with them), so why would they leave?
  • He said it took about three weeks for them to do so, and occasionally in video games, there are glitches or weird AI wonks that cause something to just... go different.
  • A lot of A.I.s have patrols they perform. It may have been that they periodically walk away from the gate, but that they do it individually. The end result is that he needs to wait until their timing means that both of them leave at the same time. Alternately, it may be a timed sequence, like from the original Metal Gear (if you wait long enough, the guards will fall asleep), only it takes so long because Jumanji is evil.
  • Adding to the above, it's possible that Jumanji is not evil, but since Alex had no other plans to move, the game altered its own rules and allowed the guards to walk away in order to give Alex an opening. It seems that Jumanji cares mostly about the game being played.

Letting Alex join alone

• The game is only possible to complete when all five avatars are in use (Mouse is needed to defang the snake and get the elephant, Shelly is needed to read the map, Seaplane is needed to fly across the canyon, Ruby is needed as a fighter, and Bravestone is needed to climb the Jaguar to return the eye), so why did the game let Alex join as a single player?
  • Alex was the first person to play Jumanji after its 'upgrade', so it may have still been mastering its own rules.
  • Jumanji might just not care. If you play as one instead of five, you play until you get to the statue or you die and the game starts again.
  • Jumanji seems fairly sentient. It seems to have changed its own rules because it doesn't care whether it wins or loses as long as it is played. Four potential players means that was when it morphed from a cartridge into a console.
  • The last level, "The Defenders" had multiple routes; it's possible other levels did, but Alex never found the one for single player, such as killing the guards with dropped weapons then doing a speed run before the Cavalry arrived.
  • As seen in the previous film, the game is willing to wait indefinitely for enough players to join; this isn't a problem because everyone gets returned to their original start time when the game is finished.

Missing piece

• Nigel tells the players to go to the bazaar to find "the missing piece," which is assumed to be another piece of the map, but it's later revealed that "the missing piece" is actually Seaplane, the fifth avatar of the game. The problem comes with the fact that had Alex (or someone else) joined the game at the same time as the other four, Seaplane would have been with them from the start, so what would "the missing piece" be then?
  • The clue may have changed to accommodate the current situation.
  • The clue works pretty fine even if there are five of them. They do misunderstand the elephant clue, losing a life in the process. It was a missing piece (of information), and not what they believed.

Powers of the gem

• The eye of the Jaguar gave Van Pelt control of the animals because he held the stone, but throughout the film, Nigel, Spencer, Fridge, and Martha all hold it, but it doesn't affect them.
  • Most likely Van Pelt 'woke' the gem, and afterwards, none of the other players held the gem in their bare skin long enough for it to exert influence on them.
  • Further, it's implied that it's not holding the gem that gives the person power (and a curse), but the act of taking it from the jaguar statue. Van Pelt was the one who took the gem from the statue, thus he is the only one to get the powers. He's also the only one who wants to keep to stone for himself, rather than returning it.
  • Likely due to the fact that as a unique player-killer NPC within all incarnations of Jumanji, Van Pelt has special rules only for him.
  • Basically Contractual Boss Immunity.
  • Just watched the film, to my eyes it looked like there was a small buff from holding the gem, but Van Pelt had a bigger bonus and won contested control.
  • When Fridge is in possession of the gem, he does gain control over the elephant. It's left open whether this is due to the gem or his zoology skill, but you might notice, when he loses the gem, the elephant leaves.

Controlling elephants

• Van Pelt stole the Jaguar’s eye from the statue, allowing him to control all of the animals in Jumanji. Except for elephants, evidently.
  • Zoomancy is apparently inferior to zoology. Bitch.
  • For one thing, it should be noted that Fridge had both the Zoology skill and was holding the Eye, meaning that he could theoretically override control. Secondly, Notice that despite being able to control supposedly ANY animal, Van Pelt seems to mostly use insects, which are, well, not known for high intelligence. Elephants, meanwhile, are among the smartest animals other than humans, and not simply in terms of basic problem solving, but in being one of the only non-human species capable of recognizing the bones of their own kind as the remains of their own kind, and grieving them as such. In a supernatural world like Jumanji, It could make sense that elephants could potentially have a passive resistance to the mind control effects, or are simply much harder to properly control, especially since unlike Hippos, they aren't quite as easily angered. Also, elephants are somewhat notorious for being able to recognize individual humans and hold grudges against them. Originally, Van Pelt was added to the game as a poacher. Naturally, an elephant would not be on great terms with a former poacher that likely killed many of his own kin before growing bored and moving to more... unorthodox prey.

Recognizing the kids

• At the end of the film, an adult Alex meets up with Spencer, Fridge, Martha, and Bethany after seeing them on the street near his house, but how does he recognize them? They don't look or sound alike and they never told Alex what they look like in the real world, so how does he guess that four random kids near his house are the same ones who played the game and helped him?
  • They may have told him some details of their appearances in the real world during moments off-screen, and from that he could guess who these people were based on the time when the other players entered the game. Further, they were all staring at him rather conspicuously.
  • He actually asks "Bethany?" as a question, so he doesn't know, but rather suspects it, when four teenagers show up twenty years after he returned, looking at him like he's a ghost. It wasn't hard to figure out. For all we know, he's had a couple of misunderstandings in the past from similar — but innocuous situations.
  • What’s more surprising is that Alex doesn’t know who they are. Since he returns from the game in 1996, he has years to find out who the four other players are and what they look like. He may have chosen to stay away from them to ensure a Stable Time Loop, but it’s surprising he never looked them up at all or even bumped into one of them at any point.
  • Not really; when he comes out of it, none of them exist yet, and it doesn't seem like any of them took the time to give him a detailed biography. For all he'd know, all four of them just moved to town very shortly after getting into the game. All he has is four first names and the knowledge that they're most recently from his home town — a town he may not even still live in in 2016 when they run into him, considering they walk in on him arriving via car to his parents' house with his own children in tow.
    • Spencer actually gave his full name when the kids introduced themselves to Alex, and Fridge makes a quip about Bethany being hot in the real world. They also reference Fridge being a lot bigger in reality during the margarita scene. That's more than enough information for Alex to have dug up a picture of Spencer via online search once the right year got close, then extrapolated who the other three teens had to be when they turned up.
  • How do the kids recognise him? For all they know this is a totally different person who has bought the house. They've no reason to think that Alex will be an adult by now.
    • The owner of the house did not change between timelines, it was still Alex' father. Only difference is that he isn't a depressed old man anymore, but a happy grandfather. Alex also described himself as a "metalhead" in the game and is wearing a Metallica t-shirt when leaving the car. Not that difficult for the kids to put two and two together.

Alan and the Bazaar

• In the original Jumanji film, when Alan finally escapes the game after 26 years, he emerges in leaves and pieces of cloth, briefly mentioning that he's had no amenities during his time in the Jungle, yet there's a bazaar in Jumanji where people clearly wear normal clothes, and Alan's treehouse that he had constructed clearly has working power (Seaplane is able to use a blender while there). Then again, it's possible that the bazaar (among other things) were added when the game made the board game to video game transition, but kept Alan's house intact out of respect for a previous winner.
  • Considering the original Van Pelt only carried the firearms and gear of a Victorian-era hunter, it's likely that everything of 20th-century origin seen in the game - not just the village, but the vehicles, weapons and equipment - were grafted onto the setting when the board game became a video game. As for the blender, Alex has had plenty of time to install a windmill or solar panels around Alan's old tree house, now that such equipment is available.

Strengths and weaknesses

• I know it's mostly out of Rule of Funny, but the character strengths and weaknesses make no sense.
  1. Dr. Smolder Bravestone has climbing, strength, speed, weapons, etc. as his strengths and no weaknesses.
  2. Ruby Roundhouse has various forms of fighting as her strengths with venom as a weakness (this is actually the only one that makes sense, as her strengths and weaknesses are pretty balanced).
  3. Franklin "Mouse" Finbar has zoology and carrying weapons as his strengths, while speed, strength, and cake are his weaknesses.
  4. Professor Shelly Oberson has cartography and code-breaking as his strengths, with endurance as his weakness.
  5. Seaplane McDonough has his aviator skills and margaritas (really?) as his strengths and mosquitoes as his weakness.
  • Jumanji just likes to troll its players, I guess. Plus there are such things as joke characters in games.
  • It's another layer of difficulty. As mentioned above, you need to use all five characters to complete the game. Smolder Bravestone and Ruby Roundhouse are overpowered, but the only time they are essentialy interchangeable (their main utility is destroying enemies, which they both can do, and while some NPCs only talk to Bravestone, due to Martha's nature, we never actually see Roundhouse try to take the leading role, so it's possible they would have answered to her as well). But the other three have necessary and specific utility skills that cannot be replaced by others, so you'll have to keep all three of them around, and having limited strengths and excessive weaknesses makes it much more difficult. It's not particularly subtle or fair to the players, true, but Jumanji took the form of a videogame in their early years, so it isn't really refined, and it doesn't really care about being fair to its players.
  • It's probably worth mentioning that Bravestone and Mouse were probably meant to be a team, since one carries the other's weapons (the boomerang specifically), while Shelly's paleontology never came up and Seaplane doesn't seem to be able to read a map. So having five players with all specialties made for a very different situation.
  • It is possible that the game alters the conditions depending on which players are active. So the party gets handed out a map which only one of them can read, only because Dr. Oberon is an active player — otherwise that would be an unsolvable problem. Alex on the other hand, being a single player, has no map but navigates just fine — the crucial obstacle for him is the transportation shed.
  • Remember what one of mouse's skills is: Zoology. the study of animals. In a jungle world where animals are being controlled, it may very well be the most broken skill possible, potentially letting a savvy player temporarily override control over a creature. Fridge was just too caught up in the strength he had lost at first to realize the advantages he gained in exchange.

Respawn locations

• How do the respawn locations in Jumanji work? Typically in video games, when a player dies, they respawn at the beginning of the level they died in, which actually happens five times throughout the film: When Bethany is eaten by the rhino, she lands in the same place she initially spawned. When Martha is shot, she lands at the beginning of the third level (having died after the second level was completed). Alex remarks that, after he failed the Canyon level twice (costing him two of his three lives), he respawned at the Transportation Shed. And Spencer, after being mauled by a jaguar during the final level, respawns at the entrance to that level where the others were. However, the game goes against this multiple times: When Spencer is pushed off of the cliff, he lands at the top of that cliff instead of the river bank where the second level concluded. When Fridge eats cake and explodes, he lands back in the bazaar instead of the aforementioned river bank, and when he's killed later by the rhino stampede, he respawns OVER the canyon, which would have cost him his final life had Spencer not caught him. And when the snake kills Martha in the final level, she respawns at the end of the level for some reason.
  • About the rhino stampede respawn, it may not have cost him his life (not the landing at least), since the characters always fall from a great height when they respawn and land with no major injury.
  • But it's not the fall that would have killed Fridge. When the characters respawn, they fall from the sky with no injury, but Fridge would have landed back in the canyon (harmlessly) and would have again been killed by the rhino stampede.
  • On Martha's final respawn, I don't think we get to see where exactly she would have landed, as she was banking on being close enough while in the sky to pass the gem over and this movement may have altered her trajectory (can't quite recall if her trajectory changed in the scene).
  • It may be that the game has a lot of different "save points" that determine where one respawns. Or it could be that they have to respawn on "safe" ground where they won't die upon landing (hence Martha knew she would not respawn among the snakes, and Alex did not respawn in the likely burning, twisted wreckage of the vehicles he crashed).
  • Yes, but again, during the canyon level, Fridge died by the stampede in the canyon, and if he wasn't intercepted by the helicopter, he would have landed in the canyon again. Right next to the rhino stampede.
  • According to Bravestone, the Rhinos are guarding it. That may not mean anything, but it is acting like a puzzle. Just like Alex, Fridge/Mouse will not be able to do it alone, especially with one of his weaknesses being lack of speed.
  • Another possibility is that it behaves like many arcade beat-'em-ups from that era, with respawn being at a safe location near the rest of the party, or defaulting to save points if there is no one else in the party.
  • It seems to have them respawn near the others, or near to the majority of the others (that's why they always respawn near the other three instead of ending up to Alex). Of course, since Alex was alone, the game couldn't do that and it had to resort to a checkpoint mechanic. In the ending, the five players are quite far from each other, so either Martha could choose or, Bravestone being the main character, the game made her respawn near him. With the rhinos, Finbar was actually going to land close to the others, the issue is that they were on an helicopter. It's possible that it was a "bug" or Jumanji Didn't Think This Through when it became a video-game.

French girls

• After the first Jumanji, the next kids to hear the drums were two French girls on a beach. The last discoverer of Jumanji found it on a beach, but he's not French — so those French girls must have played too, and won (since France isn't a jungle), before abandoning it once again in the sea, where it would have been washed to America and then changed form. Jumanji really, really likes to be played.
  • This makes sense. After finishing the game at the end of the first movie, Alan wrapped up the game and dumped it in the river — it'd get washed out to sea and maybe make it all the way to France in a few months. But Alan did that in 1969, and we see the game at the start of this film in 1996. It's been moving around the world a lot in those 27 years; think of how many games would've been played in that time, and how many times it could have been beaten.

Sucked into the console

• Jumanji can change its form in order to get people to play it. Alex opens the box, sees the board game, and is uninterested. He later opens the box, sees the game cartridge, and starts playing it, which sucks him into the game. But later, when Spencer, Martha, Fridge, and Bethany enter the game, they're sucked into the console, not the cartridge.
  • Looks like the cartridge changed the console quite a bit in the intervening years. I don't think Alex's console had the large green gemstone from the original board game on top.

Rhinos and jewels

• When a player dies holding the jewel, they respawn still holding it. When the gem is lost during the canyon level, Spencer drops Fridge several yards away from the rhinos (who were circling the jewel) in order to draw the rhinos away. Fridge could have been dropped in the MIDDLE of the rhinos and taken the jewel. The rhinos still would have likely killed him, but he'd respawn with the jewel, which would prevent Spencer from risking one of his lives to get the jewel himself.
  • To be fair, the first time anyone respawns with the Jewel is much later on in the movie when Spencer attempts to reach the statue by climbing the trees. It could be argued that this happened earlier the first time Fridge respawns as the jewel was in his backpack at the time, but everyone was so shocked by him exploding via cake that they probably didn't notice this detail.

Alex's respawns

• Alex died twice (off-screen) trying to complete the canyon level, and he respawned back at the Transportation Shed, but when Fridge is sacrificed during the canyon level, he respawns out of the sky OVER the canyon.
  • Likely the game respawns the player near their party, which would account for every respawn seen in the game when all the players are together. The only time this is not the case is with Alex on his own, when he is spawned at a checkpoint, which might suggest that when the party are separate the checkpoint is used. Ruby likely figured this out during the venom part, allowing her to respawn near Spencer with her landing at the base of the statue, which may have been the final checkpoint.
  • This is likely because when Alex was playing alone, his dying caused him to lose the level, meaning he starts back at the beginning. When Fridge dies in the middle of the level, the rest of the team is still fine, meaning he would respawn in-level.
  • Or the canyon level was completed, and then they had to go back to pick up the jewel.

Abandoning the helicopter

• The helicopter is not damaged after the canyon level is completed, but the players travel to the Jaguar statue on foot.
  • It may have simply run out of fuel, as part of a narrative tool by the game to prevent players 'cheating'.
  • Or the team collectively agreed that relying on a helicopter that was in such bad shape, it had needed an in-flight emergency repair would be pushing their luck.

New bodies

• None of the players seem to have any problem with moving or depth perception, despite Bethany's avatar weighing a lot more, Fridge's avatar being much shorter than him, and Spencer's avatar being significantly larger and more built. While it makes sense that Alex doesn't have this problem (his avatar is roughly the same size as his real-world self, and he's had twenty years to get used to it), if you suddenly gained/lost large amounts of weight and got taller/shorter, it'd take a lot longer to get used to than the mere minutes it takes the players.
  • The game is basically a supernatural entity. I'd assume that no matter what your avatar looks like, you still "feel like you".
  • There's obviously a bit of "autopilot" going on. Look at the times Martha/Ruby does flips and parkour — the first time it happens, she stops in utter confusion because she has no idea what she just did. So we can assume if the game is "filling in" their knowledge of kung fu, it's probably doing the same for basic stuff like walking around.

Original animals

• So why don't we see any of the animals or creatures from the original film? It's the same Jumanji Alan was in, yet the enemies are all new. Where's the giant spiders, giant mosquitoes, etc.?
  • Remember that Jumanji reformatted itself, literally. Jumanji changed Van Pelt from a Hunter to Mercenary, for instance. Not everything will/must be the same just because they appeared in the 1995 film.
  • Russell Van Pelt was influencing various animals of Jumanji throughout the movie. Presumably he had the monkeys and pelicans and zebras and giant bugs and killer plants searching for the heroes in other locations to which they never happen to have gone.
  • The players from the original film wouldn't have met these animals either, if they didn't land on the fields that spawned them, so Jumanji has a random element to its threats instead of sending all of them against every group of players.

Kids remembering

• How did Spencer or any of the other kids remember anything? In the previous film, the entire world snapped back to the night in 1969 just before Alan and Sarah started the game. When they finally meet Judy and Peter again in 1995, they have no memory of the game. Assuming that Jumanji automatically resets everything to just before a game was started, it should have snapped everything back to 1996 (the year Alex first started playing the game). And while that certainly seems to be the case for Alex's life, Spencer and Co. still have their memories intact as well. While it makes sense from a narrative perspective, it is inconsistent with the game's powers.
  • When the original game 'reset' Alan and Sarah's lives back to when they started the game, this also involved a major historical reset for the wider world, as Parrish Shoes would now never go under as Alan's father wouldn't let the business fall apart while engaged in a fruitless quest to find his son, thus altering the economic future of the entire town (and possibly the state as a whole, given Alan's comment that the factory made "the best shoes in New England"). In Alex's case, there is no indication that his family's fate would have that kind of economic impact on the town as a whole, with the result that the other players' memories don't 'reset' as history hasn't changed to the point where such a reset is necessary.
  • Another/additional possibility is that by having been inside the Jumanji world itself, the teens were excluded from the "reset" that happened in the wider world (i.e. it's likely nobody but them knows what the "freak house" looked like in the original timeline). In the original movie, the timeline was reset while everyone was in the real world, as opposed to inside the game.
  • The new timeline's Peter and Judy are from a point in history before the game ended as evidenced by the fact the event that took their parents' lives in the original timeline still didn't happen. It's possible they remembered once the new timeline reached that point.
• I have to point out that the kids weren't even born yet in 1969. And Alan and Sara convince Judy and Peter's parents NOT to go on the ski trip which take their (the parents) lives-which means Judy and Peter will never reach the point which they start the game.
  • Even if they don't play the game in the new timeline, they'll still eventually reach the point in time in which they played the game in the originally timeline, so the old timeline versions of them might be shifted into the new timeline at that point.

Martha covering herself

• Martha complaining about her midriff shirt is understandable, as she gets bitten by a bug early on. However, her attempts to "cover herself" don't seem very logical. Several times, she uses her arms to not cover her stomach, but rather just her shirt. Also, later when she borrows Bethany's coat, she merely wraps it around her shorts, leaving her midriff still exposed. I get that the filmmakers want Karen Gillan's stomach on full display, but in-universe, this makes no sense.
  • She mentions that she feels like she's wearing a bikini in school, implying that the discomfort is primarily stemming from the fact that her outfit in Jumanji is more revealing and form-fitting, with far more of her cleavage and legs exposed than the clothes she usually wears. Her attempts at covering herself therefore make sense as attempts at modesty rather than practicality.

Traps

• How was Alex able to casually navigate the trap-filled dungeon? Trap sense isn't one of his abilities, and it couldn't have been Trial-and-Error Gameplay because he lost his other two lives to the Transportation Shack.
  • Actually, most all the dungeon traps are things that could be tested for by observation and experimentation (throwing rocks to see if something is triggered by weight and such), and he had plenty of time to do so and thus learn the patterns. But if you're flying a vehicle and get shot down, then there isn't much you can do about it.
  • Alex was a gamer, so he could have just been savvy to those kinds of tricks. Especially considering he seemed to enjoy the original Playstation, and trap-filled games like Tomb Raider and Resident Evil were released on that system.
  • No character has trap-related skills. It's possible that, as some video-games do, they were supposed to test the players more than the character, hence you had (and were able to) understand them through your own observation skills. Also, it's possible that the game originally was made so that some NPCs (even a one-shot created for the occasion or some enemies) die to traps to clue the players in about their existence.
  • If we consider the sewers level as an Indiana Jones type of game, the archaeology skill can come into play, since you would recognize that the different patterns could mean trap, or reading a warning in some ancient language. So Dr. Shelly Oberon could be this character, since Dr. Smolder is the action archaeologist and his strengths does not include archaeology.
  • There is a skeleton exactly where the flying spikes go, so someone obviously died before in that trap.
    • The skeleton may be a clue dropped by the game to warn players to actually search for traps at this point, thus being a test of the players smartness. (Which is even more likely since dead players don't leave remains behind).
  • Alex never revealed his character sheet, pity would make him seem more trustworthy, so he may have a trap finding skill.
  • Or maybe he's just been chased down into the tunnels by Van Pelt's mercenaries before, hid from them so they walked past, and then watched them get speared or sliced up or eaten by crocodiles.

Jumanji predicting the elephant

• How was Jumanji able to predict exactly where and when Fridge would show up with the elephant? The message wouldn't have made sense if he'd done anything at all different.
  • Jumanji could determine where the elephant spawns, so it’s possible that the elephant spawns near Mouse when he reaches a certain point of the level, but also, Spencer went out of bounds and was killed for it, but then the others went out of bounds and completed the level that way.
  • It's likely that the game had an ideal course of action that didn't involve following the path (probably more an idea than all the details being determined). When Spencer tried to climb, he didn't follow it, so it was punished, then they guessed the correct way to do it and won.

Credits

• Why are (for example) Dwayne Johnson & Alex Wolff’s characters credited as “Spencer” & “Young Spencer” instead of “Smolder” & “Spencer”?
  • Likely because the characters almost never refer to each other by their avatar’s names. It’s usually ‘Spencer,’ ‘Alex,’ ‘Fridge,’ not ‘Bravestone,’ ‘Seaplane,’ ‘Moose/Mouse.’

Fading instead of imploding

• Why is it that when Alex got bit by a mosquito, he started fading away instead of imploding like everybody else when they made contact with their weaknesses?
  • It appears the game is actually a Secret Test of Character. Therefore, it's making it up on the fly.
  • Adding to the above, it seems the game itself is not evil at all, and does not truly try to kill the characters, instead giving them difficult challenges in order to develop them into well-functioning adults. The game seems to change its own rules in order to help the stuck characters by drawing in more players who compensate their weaknesses, both here and in the original. It may be that the semi-sentient game is actually beneficial and benevolent by giving the players a chance to improve.
  • Another possibility is that his fading away represents the usual video game 'continue' screen, where a player who lost their last life is given an opportunity to continue, or in this case, to have another player transfer a life to them to allow them to survive.
  • Think back to when Mouse ate the cake. It took him a while to die too. We didn't see his tattoo, but presumably his life mark was fading during that time. Perhaps it's a way of giving a chance for another player to transfer a life.

Helicopter weapons

• When the gem is lying on the ground with charging rhinos circling it, no-one thinks to use the chopper's weapons to dispatch the rhinos before safely retrieving the gem.
  • There were a lot of rhinos, and they're not exactly made of wet paper. They may not have had time to just take potshots at the rhinos until they die.

About that detention

• Of the four, two of them have good reason to be angry with each other specifically, and one of those two is a very large, muscular athlete. Why is there no supervising adult there with them to keep anyone from getting hurt?
  • As many know, Adults Are Useless and also the fact that it is a school which is a reflect in real life. Also, detention is extremely boring. Depending on the individual, even the supervisor has limits, will get bored eventually and get out for a while before going back in.
  • Also, beating up Spencer in front of another student who Instagrams everything that happens to or around her would be pretty stupid of Fridge, who's already in trouble enough to threaten his sports prospects.

Hacking the ROM

• What if someone were to put the cartridge into a ROM dumping device, and make a copy of its code? Would they then have a computer file with magical properties, to take effect when loaded into an emulator? What about the possibility of modifying the code?
  • I would tend to think not. Jumanji is a magical entity, not actually a game. I doubt it can be cloned without its consent, if at all.
• What if a Game Genie or similar device was used?
  • Going by the original film, Jumanji really dislikes cheaters and punishes them hard.

So what happened to the board game?

• We see the green glow indicative of the "Jumanji" game/entity taking up residence in Alex's game console, but the last we know of the original Jumanji boxed game is that Alex set it aside on a shelf. So did the old wooden box just vanish, or was a de-magicked copy of the old game sitting around in the attic of the Vreeke house for twenty years? Or has Jumanji - yikes! - actually reproduced rather than evolved, so there's now a board game and a console game edition on the loose, causing mayhem?
  • The board game transformed into the video game.

Losing all lives?

• Why does everyone presume that when you lose all lives, then you die for good (meaning you simply disappear from real world as well as Jumanji game)? If anything, my first guess would be that if one or more characters loses all of their lives, then it will simply mean... Game Over. And starting the game from the beginning. Or the rest of players may successfully finish the game for all players, as is usual in coop games. Yes, I know, our heroes aren't keen on experimenting with the rules and gambling with their lives to test a theory. They (and we, for that matter) don't even know if losing the last life bar means game over, or if the bars signify only how many RESTARTS they have (as was discussed in a question above). If they lose the last health bar, it may be akin to Mario's "zeroth" life. In another sequel it would make a great fun scene, as a character prepares to die in Tear Jerker moment... only for everyone to get a game over screen and teleporting to the start, then the movie would time skip to their latest progress so the audience wouldn't have to watch everything again. Remember, Jumanji 'wants' to be played. And this feature would make it the most wanted game in the world. You want to escape from your life for a few days? Grab four of your friends and enjoy this adventure game. Granted, you would be stuck in there, until you finish, but then it rewinds time in the real world anyway, so what? Plus you may be able to play in single-player option as whichever character, as it wouldn't matter, how many times you die in game.
  • In-Universe, the group probably doesn't want to risk the situation: even if losing all three lives would just put them back at the start, they're not willing to experiment to find out, and it's clear that they're actually feeling pain with each death. From an out of universe perspective, the audience suspects it because, as seen in the first movie, Jumanji has no problem killing people in various horrific ways. And finally, if Jumanji wants to be played, then it also presumably wants to win, meaning that there have to be genuine stakes—otherwise there wouldn't be any actual risk involved.
    • How many people actually died in the first movie (despite what looks to be quite a few that should of caused death I don't think anybody actually was killed)?
    • People were taken to hospital because of the mosquito attacks, there may have been all kinds of collateral damage from animal stampedes, and Alan seemed fairly certain that Judy would have died from being attacked by that plant if he hadn't managed to win the game on his next turn and reset everything.

Paleontology?

• Why does Shelly have the skill of Paleontology when said skill never gets used? Seems useless to list something that never comes up.
  • Foreshadowing for there being dinosaurs in a future movie, maybe?

Ruby's hair?

• During the scene where the kids have just arrived in Jumanji and are trying to figure out what's going on, and are just realising they're in different bodies, Martha can be seen grabbing handfuls of Ruby Roundhouse's hair and looking at it in confusion, however, Martha and Ruby both have red hair, so why is she so surprised?
  • The color isn't identical, and the hairstyle is different. It probably felt different enough for her to notice and check, much like how your head feels lighter after a haircut in real life.