VGFlicks: Space Jam: A New Legacy (Part 1)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

The movie the least suited to the ongoing theme for this year's film reviews, Space Jam: A New Legacy is the reason why I specify “Trapped in a virtual world” rather than “Trapped in a game”. However, there is a major link to video games in its plot, which means that by my metrics, it counts to be reviewed here.

Chuck Jones was not a fan of Space Jam, because he didn't
think Bugs would ever ask for outside help. At least, in A
New Legacy, it's someone coming to him for help instead.
Also, eeeesh. Mr. Jordan, forget acting, stick to sports.

I guess I’d better discuss the history of its “franchise”, if we can call it that. An idea this bizarre has its origins in the world of advertising, where Michael Jordan starred alongside Bugs Bunny in two commercials, Hare Jordan and Aerospace Jordan, both advertising Nike’s Air Jordan shoes. Chance meetings eventually led to a Nike executive being given the idea by Ivan Reitman for a feature-length film with the same formula. The plans were halted by Jordan’s retirement from basketball in 1993 to try baseball, but resumed when the athlete returned to the sport in 1995, with the commercials’ director, Joe Pytka, directing the film. Despite a… tumultuous production, shall we say, the film was finished and released to theaters on November 15th, 1996. The film hilariously implied that the Looney Tunes were responsible for Jordan going back to basketball.

Talks of a sequel happened immediately, but miscommunications caused those plans to be changed, then scrapped. The poor performance of Looney Tunes: Back in Action at the box-office was another nail in the coffin… until new talks arose in 2014, this time centering the film around LeBron James, another of the biggest basketball stars of all time (I know very little about sports and even I knew of the guy!), and with Malcolm D. Lee in the director’s chair. Filming started in July of 2019 and ended in March 2020, right before the Covid-19 pandemic got really bad; but since all that remained was animation, production wasn’t hindered by the world-changing event. The finished film was released to theaters on July 16th, 2021.

Much of what I have to say is tied to the film’s plot itself – so why not cover it, and get to my talking points when they come up? Also – why call this A New Legacy when, aside from two mentions, there’s no link between the two films?

From child to superstar

The film opens in 1998 in Akron, Ohio, where a young LeBron James is dropped off at a basketball match by his supportive mom. He is a big fan of the Looney Tunes, as evidenced by his backpack. So although he should be focusing on the game, his attention is diverted when his best friend Malik shows up with a present: An old Game Boy with a Looney Tunes game cartridge in it.

Oh hey, that's The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle!

Young LeBron James (portrayed by Stephen Kankole).

His gaming is interrupted by the coach, who hurries him onto the basketball field. In the final seconds, LeBron’s last throw at the hoop hits the rim and bounces off, costing his team the game. After the game, the coach doesn’t berate him for losing, but rather for not being focused for the entire duration of the game; and that if he pushes away distractions to give his all every time, he could truly be great. Thinking those words over, LeBron tosses the Game Boy in the trash (instead of giving it to someone else. That’s a waste, kid!).

Cue the opening credits, playing over archival footage of the athlete’s rise to stardom. His career starting at the Cleveland Cavaliers, passing by Miami Heat, returning to Cleveland, only to finally settle in Los Angeles in 2018 to play with the Lakers.

Perhaps Dom should get more court experience if he wants
to portray basketball even better in his own game.
But, then again, as a basketball superstar's kid, he
probably gets a lot of court experience already.

We return on the modern day at the James residence in LA, where LeBron’s two sons, Darius (Ceyair Wright) and Dominic James (Cedric Joe), are practicing on the family’s basketball court. Well, Darius is; Dom is busy playtesting the basketball video game he’s working on. He’s just twelve, and he’s already all-in on game development! He got signed up for a basketball camp by his dad, but he actually wants to go to the E3 Game Camp, which will be on the same weekend. However, he hasn’t told his father yet, keeping his admission to the Game Camp secret.

Everything is work between these lines? What tells you
that your two kids want to work on their free time, Mr.
James?

Dom lets go of his portable console to play, but fails to throw the ball in the net. LeBron (played by himself) witnessed that, and talks to his younger son about being focused on the field. Behaving more like a coach than a father. The whole time, Darius mimics LeBron behind his back, but the expert player knows he’s there; he can see everything that’s happening on a court. (…I bet that’s gonna come handy at the end, right? Right?) He asks his son to do a specific move, which Dom fails. Later that evening, before bed, Kamiyah James (Sonequa Martin-Green) reminds her husband that what Dom needs is a father, not a coach.

Algorithm

Meanwhile in Burbank, next door to LA, something is happening at Warner Brothers. Several floors underground, within the studio’s servers, exists a digital world: The Serververse, which contains copies of all the worlds of IPs owned by the company. It is overseen by an artificial intelligence (y’know, how we imagined AIs before recent years) that goes by Al-G Rhythm (Don Cheadle). The sentient algorithm’s task at the studio is to come up with new ideas. He has found something, but he needs the right celebrity to push that idea to the executives, and he thinks he has found it: LeBron James. Al-G confides in his assistant, a flying creature named Pete that speaks in electronic noises, that he seeks validation from the humans that own him, and he hopes that his new idea will make them respect him at last.

Al-G looks relatively reasonable in his quest for
recognition, but hoooo boy does he go off the deep end.

Three things: Don Cheadle knows what kind of movie he’s in, so he’s gonna do the work, but damnit, he’s going to ham it up like no other role possibly ever could. It helps that he was a fan of the original Space Jam, the Looney Tunes, and Michael Jordan, so taking the role was a no-brainer. Al-G speaks with an electronic effect layered onto his lines, which gets toned down to appear earnest, or heavier when angry. I’m down with that idea. I mentioned in my Jumanji: The Next Level review that I watch a lot of my movies dubbed, and dubbing often omits things; in this case, I think the French version of the movie has a lot less of that effect, which made me appreciate the original English version a little more. The dub, however, had very little impact on LeBron James’ acting skill.

We return to the James household, where we see Dom working. He uses a special software to take 360° videos of statues, tarantulas and other stuff, to digitize them into 3D models. I doubt that’s how it normally works, but we need an excuse for the later parts of the story. He’s already got models from famous players. Meanwhile, he receives an ad for the E3 camp, but he quickly pulls it from his screen when LeBron walks in.

Come on now LeBron, if you want realistic basketball in
gaming, I'm sure you can find more accurate simulators out
there. Your son's creating games to have fun!

Uh oh! This looks like a pretty nasty glitch, too.
Never heard of a glitch that erases its character, though.

Showing interest in his son’s work, LeBron offers to watch Dom play. DomBall (bit of a self-centered name, but hey, he’s 12), is basketball, sure, but it includes stuff like power-ups, and special mechanics like Style Points which can make a hoop be worth dozens of points compared to the regular maximum of three. Dom displays this by causing a Posterized, which causes the opponent to appear as a poster on the screen. LeBron takes the controller to try his special maneuver – in and out, crossover, step back, toss to the hoop – but at the end of the move the character glitches, DomBall crashes, and then bluescreens Dom’s PC causes the PC to bluescreen, erasing that day’s progress.

To lift his son’s spirits, LeBron invites him to come to WB studios; he was invited there as execs have a great idea to share with the star player. They head there with LeBron's friend Malik (Khris Davis).

The “Idea”

LeBron, Dom and Malik meet with WB executives. Al-G appears to them as a 2D-animated figure, presenting Warner 3000, stating he wants “King James” to be the leading face of the project. In short: His likeness will be digitized, and can then be used in all kinds of roles and movies. Al-G shows examples, sticking the basketball player into the Batman universe, Game of Thrones, and Harry Potter.

Considering what a fucking mess of a sport Quidditch is
(whatever I can reember of it, anyway), I assume an athlete
like LeBron would utterly HATE playing it.

…Holy shit that’s a bad idea. LeBron is more polite, but shares the sentiment, unaware that Al-G. is spying on the meeting through the security cameras. He says that his real place is on a basketball court, that athletes going into acting is usually a disaster. Allow me to mention that LeBron James’ performance is one of the most derided and mocked aspects of this film, and that it even earned him two Razzie Awards. And the same was said of Michael Jordan in the original Space Jam. So, y’know, he may be on to something here. But if it were me, I think I would have stretched that another minute – really lay it on thick that he shouldn’t be in movies. Stretch that joke to the point the audience asks why they even went to the theater for this. I now the plot requires a basketball star to happen, but even in-universe, it IS a terrible idea. If Al-G was so smart he would have chosen an actual actor to start with, and it’s not like there’s a shortage of famous names here. And if the algorithm wanted to focus on a Black, male actor, well, there are many big names there too! Daniel Kaluuya, Michael B. Jordan, Keith David, Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, Laurence Fishburne, Idris Elba, need I add more?

We should check to ensure the AI-generated LeBron doesn't
have six fingers on each hand, two tongues, or starts telling
people to kill themselves when he starts talking.
(Yes, LLMs have done the latter. They can fuck right off.)

Also, generative AI would come a few years later and do that but without any movie studio “owning” the idea. Anyone can have gen-AI make a picture of “insert actor here” in “insert role here”; it’s gonna be just a picture but hey, baby steps! As a bonus, you get to help destroy the planet AND ruin neighborhoods with data centers at the same time! Oh, and wait till I tell you about all the perks for the billionnaires who own those platforms and will play the economy like it’s a goddamn casino by inflating the stock worth of these language learning models! I mean, what are the odds that one of them ultra-rich will be dumb enough to allow their own gen-AI LLM to turn into a CSAM factory? I mean, that fucking moron would be dragged to every justice court on the planet, right?

…Sorry, I try to keep a lid on that, but… sometimes, I just need to vent. Shit fucking sucks lately. Aaaanyway!

Dom really shoulld have told him earlier about the E3 camp.
(Also, it feels super weird to know that E3 would shut down
merely two years after this film's release.)

The execs rally with LeBron and insult the algorithm, which doesn’t take it well. However, Dom, who knows his stuff with programming, wants to know more about the program itself. He ends up overtalking about the game he’s making, and his desire to attend the E3 Game Design Camp, forgetting that his dad is right there, hearing everything. This leads to Dom having to come clean about wanting to ditch the basketball camp. The kid angrily leaves the meeting, with LeBron following him to try and talk.

Trapped in the Serververse

Back in my day, virtualization required scanners, a
quantum computer, nuclear power, and the ability to
rewind time. None of that spherical thingamabob!

Al-G is livid, but he gets something even more nefarious in mind upon seeing Dom and his dad get into an elevator. The program redirects the elevator to several floors underground, and the father and son are too busy arguing to notice. They end up on the server room floor, and Dom doesn’t even question it when the doors open for him with a “Welcome, Dominic James”. LeBron, who’s following behind, sees Dom approaching a strange sphere atop a staircase, the sphere glowing with a scary light, and Dom suddenly disappearing. The sports star rushes towards the thing, and he gets sucked in too.

Scary computer man!

Neither can believe it when they reappear, digitized into the virtual world of the servers. Al-G appears to them in a giant, spooky AI form, but he then takes on a human appearance to talk to them – making himself taller than LeBron to joke around. After getting back to his normal size, Al-G presents to them the Serververse, where all the properties owned by Warner Bros. exist on their separate planets. When LeBron talks to his son, he realizes Dom is gone.

LeBron may think basketball is very serious business,
but even he has never played a match with such stakes.

The real Al-G makes himself known. He’s angry that LeBron rejected his idea, and he’ll get that validation any way he can. He challenges LeBron to a basketball game, since that’s where the athlete says he wants to be. The match will be watched by LeBron’s fans, finally getting the program the recognition he wants. If LeBron wins, he gets his son back and they can leave. But if he loses… they will be stuck in the Serververse forever. That’s not gonna be easy, Al-G is a reality warper in this realm.

But hey, he’s gonna give LeBron a chance to build a basketball team… By tossing him to Tune World. The player is sent flying through the Warner Bros. universe, with properties represented by planets. He passes by:

Just zoomin' by!

-Westeros (allegedly had a longer scene planned, but it was scrapped following the poor reaction to the HBO show’s final season);

-Casablanca;

-Harry Potter (Rowling had already revealed her bigotry when this film came out, I am glad there isn’t any sequence in that world);

-Wizard of Oz (not visited, but could have been fun);

-The Matrix;

-Before reaching Tune World, passing through the Tune Rings and crash-landing onto the planet.

LeBron emerges from a Nike logo-shaped crater (because we can’t avoid jokes about brands in a movie about basketball, come on now), to realize he got turned into a cartoon. But! It comes with all the perks of being a cartoon: He’s effectively unkillable and can injure himself without any damage. Over Tune World is a timer counting down, giving the star 24 hours to assemble his team to face the algorithm.

"I feel like I had an entire dimension robbed from me!
I've only got two left!"

Maybe it's nostalgia, or my age, speaking, but 2D animation
like this almost feels... cozy, in a weird kind of way.

I raised that point when it was in theaters: Can we appreciate that this film features plenty of 2D animation in an era massively dominated by CGI? It’s nice to see. Sure, the final match has most characters as CGI, but the animation on the way there isn’t. The movie adapts its animation to the worlds it visits. For all the film’s flaws (there are MANY), I will always at least applaud it for this, and it is fun to see that Warner Bros. at least entertains the idea of keeping 2D animation alive. As proven by other projects such as The Day The Earth Blew Up, which I saw in theaters last year – boy am I glad Ketchup Entertainment rescued that one, as well as Coyote VS. ACME coming out this summer, from both the abyss of tax writeoffs and David Zaslav’s reality TV-addled brain!

Tune World is empty. Not a character in sight. In the forest, LeBron pulls a Duck Season poster and says “Rabbit Season?” aloud. Oh, you could have just hummed “Shave and a Haircut”! LeBron is chased by burrowing ground, from which pops Bugs Bunny.

You okay thee buddy? You're looking a little more...
...crazy than usual.

Oh hey, I’m running long today – tell you what, how about we resume in Part 2?