Bemused, he puts the cartridge into one of his older consoles, but decides against playing. Alex, suddenly suspicious of the mysterious object, opens it to find an 8-bit game cartridge inside. As he plays his console, the camera focuses on Jumanji, implying that the game is watching how players of a new generation approach gaming. None too fussed about a meager board-game when he has a PlayStation, Alex casts aside the antiquated media.
In an opening prologue, we're shown that the original Jumanji game found itself washed up on a beach, where an unsuspecting jogger picked it up and took it home to give to his teenage son, Alex. Similarly, the sequel has the game appear as an innocuous retro 8-bit adventure video game, before our protagonists are sucked into a massive jungle simulacrum where they must complete a particular quest in order to escape. The 1995 original imagined the horrors of a tabletop game literally coming to life. As with the original, the central theme of the movie is a play on our relationship with the evolution of gaming. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a return to the universe of the mysterious board game Jumanji - except this time it's turned itself into a videogame, in an effort to capture the attention of 21st century screen-obsessed teens.
