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| Directed by Chris Columbus Written by Timothy Dowling, Tim Herlihy Patrick Jean, and Adam Sandler |
Alo Party Peoples.
I'm not a gamer, I never really have been. To me the very term "gamer" reeks of corporate marketing identities and conspicuous consumption. That's not me saying that games can't be art, that attitude is just so last century, but a pretty huge portion of the people that earnestly embrace that marketing identity don't seem to want it to be art if that means that the medium is seriously discussed. That's pretty much the exact opposite of how I think of art, so I'm not a gamer.
I bring that up because the vast majority of the people reviewing and panning Pixels are 30-something members of the Generation X "geek press" that became the new establishment of film criticism around the turn of the millennium. i.e. people that grew up with the classic arcade game iconography that Pixels is pretending to be a love letter to. I'm about as far from those people as possible, so I can say that even if you have no attachment to this iconography or that time period, Pixels is still a dull, unfunny action-comedy that, well, let me put it like this. If The Lego Movie was a subversion and an indictment of soulless, assembly line, film-as-product corporate art, then Pixels just is soulless, assembly line, film-as-product corporate art. Right down to coming from the creative null field of the Sony Corporation and helmed by a
film-maker that has become the 21st Century face of corporate art.
The plot to Pixels, loosely based off of a charming eponymous short film from a few years ago (the creator of which I hope is at least getting royalties off this) is essentially reverse Tron by way of Jumanji. Aliens mistook samples of Earth's popular culture contained in a NASA probe for a declaration of war, and sent an army of energy monsters mimicking the forms of early 80s arcade games contained within those samples our way. After discovering that conventional weapons are useless against them because of this, Kevin James' US President (seriously) calls up Adam Sanlder, Peter Dinklage, and Josh Gad as a bunch of washed up former arcade-champions to combat the Atari-an menace.
Going into this, I thought "Sure, it's Adam Sandler, but maybe the effects will be interesting." since this particular era of video games isn't generally done in live-action, but the monsters in Pixels are glowing and constantly shifting around, which makes them complex enough to be interesting but not thought out enough to actually look good in motion. Tron: Legacy did a far better job of translating Atari-era game aesthetics into live-action, and that's because they did more than just putting the sprites onscreen and going "Hey look, Space Invaders! Remember Space Invaders? Give us your time and money to remind you that Space Invaders existed!"
But even if the game sequences didn't look less like a movie and more like a Nickelodeon game show they wouldn't distract from the fact that there is no rhyme or reason to how the games are supposed to work. Sandler and company take on the player role in the Centipede scene, but they play the ghosts in the Pac-Man scene, and suddenly go back to the player role in the Donkey Kong scene with no justification. At one point using a cheat code works with no explanation of how it was entered or why it matters, did anyone proofread the screenplay for this cinematic fan-fiction?
Actually, fan-fiction isn't the right term, since it implies that the people making it have such a strong attachment to the material that they felt compelled to expand on it, and Pixels is pop-cultural appropriation. No matter how many references it makes or how many classic-MTV needles it drops, it's clear that nobody involved has any attachment to the arcade miasma it co-opts beyond the ability to sell tickets based on Generation X's nostalgia-industrial complex.
Pixels is a cinematic disasterpiece, not a single joke lands, none of the actors have any chemistry with each other, the action scenes feel like they were shot over a weekend, or at least would if not for how much money went into the CGI. It is easily the worst film of this year's blockbuster season, and the worst thing that Hollywood has done to video games since the Super Mario Bros. movie.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 1/5
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