Movie Breakdown: Pixels (Noah)
The Impression:
Somehow, in some terrible, horrible way the trailers for Pixels have managed to convince me that a new Adam Sandler film directed by the ghost of Christopher Columbus’ career might be good. I apologize to my own brain for allowing this to be a thought.
The Reality:
Pixels is, handily, the worst film I’ve seen this year, possibly in the last ten. I would pair it with Halle Berry’s Catwoman and a video I once saw of a woman pleasuring a horse as an unholy trinity of all that is awful in the world. In 1982, America sends a probe into the space-heavens loaded with, amongst other things, a collection of classic video games, in the hopes that an alien life-form will find the probe and be alerted to the presence of humans. Cut to today, Kevin James (his character is so forgettable I can’t remember his name, or take the time to look it up on IMDB) is President and, well, the Earth is under attack by alien representations of said classic video games. Seemingly, the probe from 1982 somehow convinced the aliens that Earth was looking for a scuffle, and now, well, they’re here, because aliens are seemingly very stupid, to battle our kind with our video game creations. Because this movie is horrible, Kevin James’ best friend is Adam Sandler (playing serious Adam Sandler) who was, at one point the best video game player in the world. Now, with a team of other former video game players, they must battle the aliens in a series of video game related, uh, competitions. And what follows is two solid hours of absolute shit. Chris Columbus has managed to make a flashy film that doesn’t make any sense, follows no rules, and is populated by some of the most egregiously obnoxious characters in film history. Including, and I’m sad to write this, Peter Dinklage as a PG version of a sexist, racist, cheating ex-con. This is our obsession with nostalgia finally pushed to its terrible, logical end; a series of loosely connected scenes featuring Bad Pac Man, Bad Donkey Kong, and Bad Every Other Video Game Character of All Time battling to destroy our world. Things happen, nothing of importance and or imbued with any sort of consequence and or feeling; characters do stuff; and the movie ends with the feeling that everything good about your childhood was dragged into an alley and beaten into a coma. Hopefully this film will bomb so miserably that anything from the 80s now being zombified into a skeleton of a film will be placed back into the exhumed grave and allowed to fade into our memories in peace.
The Lesson:
Please, someone lower the flag to half-mast at Atari headquarters and signal that our days of nostalgia regurgitation have come to an end.
