Fridge Brilliance
- A small one, but parallel to "Jumanji", Lisa has one role in the movie. She's the counterpart to Aunt Nora: the female character who is related to the main characters (aunt/sister) and gets caught up in the adventure later on (monkey in her car/wakes up from cryonic chamber). Not to mention neither take it so well when they see the state their house is in (their mansion overgrown with Jumanji vines and nephew turned into a monkey/their brothers actively stoking a fire in the house).
- Also, each one acts as a Spanner in the Works in one way or another: If Aunt Nora hadn't gone with Officer Bentley to the old Parrish Place, they wouldn't have broken down the door and emptied the monsoon from the house. Likewise, if it hadn't been for Lisa, she wouldn't have pushed that piano onto the remaining Zorgon preying on her brothers.
- The malfunctioning robot's rocket-propelled charge seems like a pure glitch, considering it accomplishes nothing but to get its manipulator-arm stuck in the fireplace bricks. But considering that Zorgons are evidently one of the more common threats in Zathura's sci-fi milieu, firing off those rockets - emphasis on the fire - might've been as much an attempt to bait the "alien life form" into its clutches as an attack on that supposed alien!
- Many people pointed out how incorrect space is in this film, comparing it to real life space and what is known about it, which includes that it has no air. However, when you take into account Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle and it's followup, The Next Level, or just the events of the first Jumanji film where Alan is sucked into the game, space shown in the film is an artificial construct for it's players. This would account for why space isn't correct and how there's gravity and air: the game wants the players to remain alive for them to learn their lesson and the environment is a reflecting of the space theme of the game.
- In the "two Dannys" scene, the Danny that appears in response to Walter's wish is much cleaner and less disheveled than the one that'd been there from the start. Of course he is: that Danny was wished out of existence before he'd had the chance to get all grubby riding in the dumbwaiter or sneaking into the Zorgon ship.
Fridge Horror
- It's not clear if the game takes them to a pocket dimension or some far off area of space, but most of the characters summoned by Zathura act independently of the game's directions. And since the astronaut is a real person, whose to say the Zorgons aren't? The game may only summon things to the house instead of creating them, except for the Robot. Meaning even if the game is finished, the Zorgons may still be out there in deep space....
- The three Jumanji films all have supernatural creatures of some sort; Take, for example, the giant mosquitoes and man-eating plants in the first one. So I'd reckon it the former, with the trio and their house getting sucked into the game just like Alan and the kids from WTTJ/TNL, since it's confirmed they take place in the same universe. (Along with the game itself, yes, but when does stuff like this ever apply to the law's of physics, anyway?) It does bring in the implication that there may be other games that are cursed beyond these two....
- The question of what happened to Lisa in the Astronaut's original timeline. With the house basically trapped in space now that Danny wasn't there to take his turn, Lisa and Walter would have been just as stuck, but there would have also been threats such as the Zorgons to deal with. What are the odds that the Astronaut only learned certain details, such as what Zorgons eat, because Lisa fell victim to the perils of space before the Astronaut had learnt all the knowledge he would subsequently share with Walter and Danny...
