Columbia Pictures' Pixels

A Movie Review

How did I miss Columbia Pictures’ Pixels when it came out? Granted, I was still reeling from the effects of my 2012 divorce when this came out. I also had a new GF. if I was even allowed to call her that at that point, and I was a brand new blogger at in 2015 when Pixels was released but that’s no excuse. What matters is that I missed this movie and I shouldn’t have.

Any movie with Adam Sandler and Peter Dinklage is probably going to be worth watching. They’re two of the reasons that Pixels works so well. Sandler, as usual, plays himself in a different outfit, only this time some of his more obnoxious personality flaws are missing or at least muted. Dinklage is Dinklage; this time flawlessly portraying an early Eighties arrogant video game champion turned convict. “Fireblaster” indeed. He’s not the most principled individual but he tends not to lose and that counts for a lot.

The beginning of Pixels felt like a trip back to my childhood. I was there in the early Eighties. I remember the games. I remember arcades like the one shown early in the movie and, if I’ve never competed in video game competitions like the one shown in the movie, I’ve at least heard and read about them. I loved it. Pixels is a movie with a strong side of Ready Player One type Eighties nostalgia without being a Ready Player One clone. I’m really digging this wave of Eighties callbacks and this is actually a really good example of such.

After a few minutes establishing the bona fides of both Fireblaster, Adam Sandler’s Brenner and a few others, we fast forwarded to the present. It took a second to catch onto what was happening, but it quickly becomes apparent that the Earth is under attack. When the US sent a time capsule on one a space probe, it included examples of American culture, to include video games. Some alien race (and it never is made clear who they are, precisely) has found this time capsule and decided that it was a declaration of war. They then send an attack force comprised of video game characters to do battle on their behalf.

Both sides have three lives. There is a series of challenges. Lose a challenge, you lose a life. The first side to lose three challenges/lives loses the war. Loss of the war will result in the annihilation of the Earth or uhh…

I’m not sure what the loss penalty was for the aliens. That detail was never included but that makes sense in a way. Who ever knew what happened to the ghosts in Pac Man when you completed a level? Not me. You just kept rocking along and helped to make it through the next level. And the next. And the next. And so on.

The amount of games in Pixels is staggering. I personally remember seeing Galaga, Tetris, Joust, Arkanoid, Joust, Q-bert, Frogger, and a bunch of other stuff. Some of it goes by really fast. It was a hoot though. Even if I had to google Arkanoid to figure out how to spell it. I mean, it’s been a minute, okay? Some things just don’t stick in your brain the way you want them to.

And it’s nice seeing video game nerds participate in the fight to save the world. Listen, I love movies with lots of guns and explosions and physically fit mega-soldiers armed with nukes. I’ve watched a bunch of them. But I’ve got a lot more in common with a gamer than I do with an ‘operator’ and that made it interesting. Watch guys like myself and my friends getting to do cool stuff and win the awards and accolades was awesome.

I don’t want to know what the special effects budget for Pixels was but I’m guessing it was more than I made last year. I’ll be honest in stating that it’s probably less expensive to create Eighties video game characters onscreen than it would be to sink the Titanic or blow up a Death Star, it obviously isn’t cheap and the amount of car wrecks in this thing alone would be expensive.

They looked good for being what they were. Eighties video games didn’t have the graphics that modern games do. The CGI in Pixels was true to the way things looked forty years ago. It didn’t have the sharpness and realisticnessitude (YES THAT IS A WORD) that modern games do. That’s okay. The movie worked because things looked the way they used to. I mean, when I see a Frogger frog it needs to look like a Frogger frog or it doesn’t put me in a Frogger frog flavored fit of nostalgia and I therefore get froggy. Pixels got that part right. It needed to look old-school, because these games were all old-school.

Pixels also sports an enemies to lovers type love affair for you Romantasy types, even if it’s not as sexually explicit as some romance fans would prefer. I actually kind of enjoyed it and Adam Sandler managed to not trip over his own feet to the point where I was rooting for the woman to break his nose this time. I’m pretty impressed. I don’t think he’s over quite managed that before. Seriously, dude got through a whole romance arc without using the phrase “old balls” once. Who would’ve ever thought that was possible? It’s actually fun and a little bit goofy. I enjoyed that part of it.

I’m seriously thinking about downloading an Atari emulator after watching this. Or maybe an Intellivision emulator, since that’s where I used to play Burger Time and that was definitely on there. Then again, I could probably do both. I can’t imagine either one would take up all that much space on my hard drive. A chance at memorizing some patterns and beating some games might be the perfect thing to occupy my mind during the dead of winter. I’ll have to look in to that.

Bottom Line: 4.5 out of 5 Cheat Codes

Pixels
Columbia Pictures, 2015