Movie Monday (Wednesday Edition) - Pixels
When I first saw the preview for Pixels, you bet your ass I got excited. Galaga spaceships and Pac Man, alive and destroying stuff; it looked so cool. Unfortunately, for many people, excitement turned into disappointment when we saw that it starred Adam Sandler and “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” co-star Kevin James. I groaned and moaned and swore up a storm, but then seconds later, Donkey Kong appeared on screen and I was excited again. Familiar characters, authentic designs and a premise photocopied from my elementary school daydreams, but brought to you by Happy Madison Productions, which has made so many unwatchable disasters. We didn’t know what to expect.
The premise is that back 1982, the human race sent a message into space with videos and pictures of life on Earth. Aliens find it, but the only thing they apparently cared about were recordings of arcade games, which they somehow take as a declaration of war. Thirty years later, the aliens arrive and invade with physical recreations of those video game images. But instead of a clash of armies, the aliens fight this war by trying to beat us as real-life versions of our own
games.
Sony Pictures
Adam Sandler is Brenner, a former arcade prodigy who gave it all up after he came in second place in a local arcade competition once. He didn’t even do poorly, he just didn’t win. He uses this meager failure as his excuse for his life not turning out the way he wanted. Brenner’s best friend since childhood, Cooper (Kevin James) is the President of the United States. Which is… wow. We have video game characters coming to life turning everything into cubes, but somehow Paul Blart as the US President is the more ridiculous premise. He recruits Brenner, their paranoid buddy Ludlow (Josh Gad) and gaming champion Eddie Plant (Peter Dinklage) to fight off the (literal) Space Invaders.
Sandler’s character is completely unlikeable. He of course has a bland love interest named Violet (Michelle Monaghan) who has an equally bland son named Matty. The writing is terrible, yet I’ve seen much worse from Happy Madison. It wants to be a comedy, but not one joke lands it. The only thing that was a little funny General Sean Bean bullying Josh Gad. Otherwise, we had Gad dry humping the floor (which is the least disturbing sexual thing he does in this film) and British people talk funny. Sandler and James pretty much play the most empty vessel characters you could make. Peter Dinklage and Josh Gad both become immediately obnoxious. Monaghan is only there to make Sandler seem attractive to someone, and to kick ass in the last ten minutes.
All that aside, the CG effects are the best part of this movie, easily. The video game characters are all made up of smaller brightly colored, glowing cubes, like Lego pieces. I’m glad they didn’t go with something smoother and more defined like most CG these days. These things just look cool in the real world, from Q-Bert to Donkey Kong. But nothing compares to seeing a giant Pac Man tearing through New York City, chomping away everything in its path.
Sony Pictures
The action works amazingly well too. If you’re like me, you’ve imagined taking on real life versions of Centipede and other games like that, and Pixels delivers that. Each action scene is unique and if you know how each games works, you’ll appreciate what they do with it even more. In the fight with Pac Man, the “Arcaders” (their word, not mine) are given different colored cars to be the four ghosts. When I saw the cars in the trailer, I was thinking “well, how would that work?.” They wouldn’t automatically be harmful to Pac Man just for being brightly colored, but they equip them with an energy field generator that’s harmful to the aliens. It’s a cool little conceit. The final battle is spectacular and worth the price of admission. All the action was so good; it really did leave me wanting more. More time for each action scene, more scenes like that in general… Unfortunately, we had to sit through quite a bit of bullshit between them. I wish they were the cut scenes in video games that I could just press the B or X button to skip and go directly to the next level.
This movie is nerd escapism, pure and simple, which I don’t fault. Just replace the main characters with yourself and your old gaming buddies and add a little charm and likeability to them. The characters don’t matter; yet take up way too much time not mattering. feel you’ll have a better time with this film if you have a personal connection with old 8-bit gaming, and that’s probably why this movie gets more hate then I think it deserves. Don’t get me wrong, it’s bad, but not as bad as most Adam Sandler films that have come out in the last decade or so. Good action and effects clash with the crappy characters and writing.
Sony Pictures
Also it should be noted that despite what the movie says, there are no cheat codes for the Pac Man or Donkey Kong arcade games.