VGFlicks: Pixels (Part 1)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5

I hope you guys like the sacrifices I make for you.

Ten dollars, an hour’s worth of pay, went into buying the DVD for this movie. You see, while I am actually quite proud of the original review I wrote for this film back in 2015, I felt it just was not enough to convey everything that’s wrong with it. And, sadly, I need the movie to add pictures to the review.

Imagine a gamer seeing those five posters, in giant form, at his local theater,
and getting hyped about the film. That was me. These looked awesome.
What a damn shame.

Pixels, a project helmed by Adam Sandler and directed by Chris Columbus (known for writing Gremlins and directing Mrs. Doubtfire and the first three Harry Potter films), could have been done right. Unfortunately, anything that stars Adam Sandler will attract ire these days. This one is a 100-minute film adaptation of a 3-minute short about arcade classics coming to life, invading the world, and destroying it bit by bit. I already stated that I don’t like the original short, mostly because of how it just shows destruction and cool effects, without any heroes to go against the threat. Just a reason to turn the planet into a giant cube devoid of life to show off special effects. You’d think adapting that for a feature-length movie would improve it. But, again: Adam Sandler.

Now, to be fair to Sandler, he didn’t write the thing. He produced it, along with Chris Columbus, Mark Radcliffe and Allen Covert. The screenwriters were actually Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling. These guys clearly needed to rewrite more than a few scenes. And of course, since Sandler is the main character and the movie revolves around his usual schtick, backlash was bound to happen. This concept could have been done right. It wasn’t. Happy Madison couldn't have done this right.

Jump with me into one of the most reviled video game movies of all time. A film so bad, some online critics have become infamous for their reviews of it. Many gamers can’t even bring this one up without internally screeching. I’ll try to keep my composure as I revisit this film, discussing every plot point, and pointing out everything wrong with it. Emphasis on "try".

What's that? Sandler giving a heartfelt
performance as a guy who's on the verge of
death after destroying his own life with a
universal remote? Yep.

But first, a few more words about Adam Sandler. What happened, man? Your first comedies were at least decent – or maybe it’s just because your comedy style wasn’t so well-known at the time. Then you had some more serious movies like The Wedding Singer, Punch-Drunk Love, Reign Over Me or Funny People (the latter which was spoiled to Hell and back by its own goddamn trailer). I personally like Click. Between all the shots of the family dog fucking a giant ducky plush, there’s actually a fairly clever concept with moments of real emotion. I swear, the ending made me cry. Click gave me the feels, a friggin’ Adam Sandler movie has joined the pantheon of movies that brought me to tears.

The Internet: It has a graph for anything.
Too bad this one isn't updated for 2017.

Then… well, Sandler was already derided by serious movie-watchers as lowbrow comedy shlock at the time, but then Jack and Jill happened, and he never quite recovered. The next years saw him in disastrous live-action films (That’s My Boy, Grown-Ups 2, The Ridiculous Six, and now The Do-Over, a Netflix exclusive that currently holds a 5% rating on RottenTomatoes). His only apparent saving grace seems to be his voice-acting role as Dracula in both Hotel Transylvania films, which I love. Pixels just joined the pile of bad films starring him. In other words: Adam Sandler is actually able to make good stuff. But for some unfathomable reason, he keeps releasing rubbish films. And that’s a shame, as he’s apparently one of the nicest guys in Hollywood! If Biff Tannen’s actor is to be believed, anyway.

Call it karma.

Pixels also came under fire during its promotion. The marketing department approached the Yogscast, offering them to produce paid content promoting the movie. When Mark Turpin, CEO of Yogscast, refused… the marketing department behind Pixels made the videos anyway, referring to them as the “Yogcast”, which is a shitty thing to do after they turned down the offer. And of course, something else happened: “Pixels” is a pretty generic term, so problems arose when the owners of the license for the film issued DMCA takedowns on YouTube to just about any video that had Pixels in the name – including, oh the irony, the original short film and EVEN THE FILM’S OWN TRAILER. That one also left a lot of people pissed. This movie had an uphill battle, and it wasn’t gonna win.

Now that this is all out of the way, we can actually talk about the movie. And I’ll provide plenty of pictures, don’t worry. I mean, what do you expect me to do? Use my own sketches, my own footage of a parody of the events of the film to illustrate my point? You need the actual images to properly judge of the quality – or lack thereof – of the work you’re reviewing. How can you go and just make sketches, and review THAT? Come on now, that’s the stupidest idea ever. I don’t see how a reviewer with any self-respect would do such a thing.

As an aside, I saw this film in theaters back in 2015 because I had some hope, and after buying the DVD for this review I had to watch it at least three more times to make sure I wouldn’t miss a single thing to critique in this review. Four times watching Pixels, that’s the gamer equivalent of torture porn. I’d only enjoy it if I was a masochist.

Young Sam Brenner. (Young Adam Sandler? Poor sod.)
Played by Anthony Ippolito.

The film begins in 1982. Remember that, it’s important. We meet our protagonists, Sam Brenner and Will Cooper, back in the days before they metamorphosed into Adam Sandler and Kevin James, respectively. They’re what you can expect pre-teens to be: Both are video game-obsessed nerds, Sam is shy and socially awkward, Will steals his own sister’s quarters she earned by selling lemonade.

Of course Will is gonna share with his friend the quarters he
stole. It's only courtesy.
(Young Will played by Jared Riley.)

It's magic: If you know the code behind a game and
figure out the patterns, you become instantly a champion
at it.

The two kids head out to Electric Dreams Factory, the new arcade that just opened in their home town. A nice, cozy place with arcade machines all around, a claw machine… Nobody is better than Will with the claw machine! There’s a reason I mention this, it becomes plot relevant later. As the opening credits invite themselves into the various games present, we see Sam studying the games as others are playing them. Sam Brenner is very smart, and can figure out patterns in the code in order to figure out how a game will react to his input, allowing him to plan ahead and ace most of these games merely through a few minutes of study.

Just… just roll with it, we’ll pretend that it makes sense. I mean, sure, congrats, you know what the game will do next. Doesn’t mean you have the dexterity and speed required to react in time. It’s like someone grabbing a weapon and becoming an instant marksman with it. That’s not how that works in real life.

The nerdiest of them all.
(Young Ludlow played by Jacob Shinder.)

However, so far so good, when it comes to the years; Centipede came out in 1980, Defender in 1981, Pac-Man in 1980, Galaga in 1981, Frogger in 1981, Space Invaders in 1978… Sam becomes so good with the games that he decides to go to the 1982 Worldwide Video Arcade Championship. There, he’ll compete against other arcade champions and try to reach the top. This is where Sam and Will meet Ludlow Lamonsoff, the Wonder Kid. This nerd is enamored with Lady Lisa, a scantily-clad assassin lady in a red dress and a katana in each hand, star of her own video game (Dojo Quest) who appears in a close-up on the screen. Well, he's ahead of trends, he already has a waifu before the Internet existed and it became a thing. Another weird quirk of Ludlow: He’s a conspiracy theorist. Even as a kid in 1982. Remember this, because it's gonna hurt later. A lot. Sam invites Ludlow to become their friend regardless.

Young Eddie played by Andrew Bambridge.
Gotta give credit to the child and teenage actors here...
They need the recognition and honors.
They're in Pixels, for God's sake.

Then we meet Eddie Plant. An arcade champion with an ego larger than the convention center, cool sunglasses, and a tendency to use 80’s slang at every chance he gets. I need an 80’s-English dictionary to understand this guy. “Tubular”? Really? Urgh, the slang Super Mario World taught me isn’t going to help me here. On top of that, Plant the gaming champion has a posse of fangirls – which, come on now, that’s probably the most unrealistic thing so far in this film about video games.

Now, if modern gaming competitions were portrayed
with as much passion in a movie...

Dan Aykroyd, who presents the competition, explains that the day’s exploits will be recorded on a cassette tape that will be sent to space, along with other memorabilia of human society, in the hopes of contacting alien life. The competition begins, and soon Sam rises above the other participants. He reaches the finals, and gets up on the stage against Eddie Plan. The final game? Donkey Kong. The competition is tough as Sam manages to figure out the patterns early on, and the visuals during this scene are pretty cool – what with the game graphics flying around the players. Also awesome is the orchestral rearrangement of Queen’s We Will Rock You, which… if there is ONE good thing that I can say about this film, it’s that this rearrangement kicks ass. That’s not enough to be a saving grace, but I like it. (And I can listen to it without watching the damn film.)

No, really: Second place isn't that bad.
You got on the podium, man.
It's a shame that nobody cares about second-placers.

On later levels, the speed and randomness increase, and Sam can’t keep up. He eventually loses to Eddie Plant – which shouldn’t be so bad, he got the second place. That’s better than nothing, right? That still makes him the second best Donkey Kong player in the world! Eddie takes that opportunity to pour some more salt in the wound, because this guy has seemingly never heard of sportsmanship. Thankfully, Will is quick to reassure his friend: He’s still a genius, he’ll still accomplish great things, he’s still gonna marry a hot celebrity. The two talk of Samantha Fox and Madonna, both of whom had started their careers in 1982, but neither of them got really famous until the following year… Problem of setting a story in the past: You need to avoid anachronisms. And while the movie so far has a decent track record with the games it features… that’s not going to last, it’ll show games from the 80’s that came out after 1982.

Cut to modern day (2015), where Adam Sandler and Kevin James are in a bar, again talking about which celebrity they’d like to have as their wives. I'll do my best to call them Sam Brenner and Will Cooper again, but the movie makes little distinction between the actors and their characters. They talk about work and how it’s taken too much place in their lives… and then it’s revealed, through a news report on TV, that Will Cooper is now President of the United States.

Even his bodyguards don't take him all that seriously.

Allow me to discuss that aspect: It’s first mentioned like a throwaway gag or a plot twist. Come on now, Will Cooper, the fat kid of average intelligence, becoming President? It’s as unlikely as giving the job to a reality TV star- oh wait. Later lines imply that this movie takes place in an alternate History where Will Cooper became President, probably by defeating Obama in 2012. The character is basically a parody of George W. Bush, prone to mistakes at best, an incapable at worst, and the movie also goes on and on about how Cooper has the lowest public opinion ever recorded in the history of the country. Geez, to have such a low approval rating, he must have managed to piss off everyone, from hardworking Americans to stay-at-home mothers, passing by social justice warriors, NRA members, and even the Neo-Nazis! At least he’s not implying that anti-Nazis are as bad as actual Nazis. Oddly enough, James offers a fairly decent performance here, mainly as the voice of reason as the film descends into insanity.

Yeah, sure, he takes some time out of office to go at a pub with a friend for a
meal. Since the joke is that he's incompetent, see it another way: That's less
time spent dealing with important papers and legislations in the Oval Office.

President Will Cooper is basically “that President you’d go have a beer with”. Honestly? For all the flaws in the character, I’d go have a beer with Will Cooper. I’d go have a beer with Kevin James. You know what, throw in Adam Sandler too. Let's just not talk about their movies. And Josh Gad. Oh! And Peter Dinklage, I bet this guy is an awesome guy to go have a drink with! Have you ever wondered which celebrity you’d want to casually go have a beer with, art quality and talent notwithstanding?

On top of all that, Will Cooper may be performing poorly as President, but at least he’s still a decent person who takes a little bit of time out of his important role to chat with his friend, and who tries to govern while still being a nice guy – which makes him leagues better than the current confrontational President. You know what? Kevin James 2020. Make it happen. Can’t be worse than what the United States have at the moment.

I'd also like to point out that the editing of that TV news
segment was made like it was a comedy movie. That's not
how TV news edit their segments.

We see President Cooper failing to read a book to kids on national television, in a video shot that just seems made to humiliate him further. It's a reference to Bush fumbling his words while reading to kids after he was told of the 9/11 disaster, because THAT'S something to joke about, am I right? Totally not a dated joke either, it was just 14 years prior! When Sam and Will come out of the bar, there’s an angry mob waiting. Sam gets to mock the President some more and leaves in his work van… for the NERD Squad. For all that talk of being a genius who can detect code and figure out patterns, Sam Brenner found nothing better as a daytime job than installing hardware in people’s houses. I mean, it’s a necessary job, but he sure isn’t happy with it.

Meanwhile, at Yigo, Guam, little lights of various colors descend from the sky, through the clouds. Starships appear, take on a formation not unlike those seen in video games, and fly down to the roads where they make their way towards a nearby military base. A road sign is blasted and turned into little cubes. Yeah, the name of the movie is Pixels, although the 3D equivalent is called Voxels, but let’s not get pedantic about that. All we need to know is, the aliens are here, and they’re gonna be trouble.

I guess I can cut here for now. See you in Part 2.

…Urgh, there's so much to say…