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Adam Sandler’s Pixels is a Slap in Our Faces

Adam Sandler’s Pixels is a Slap in Our Faces

Pixels is the worst thing to happen to video game cinema. Yes, worse than the Mario Bros. movie. Yes, worse than Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Yes, worse than Bloodrayne, Alone in the Dark, and all those other crappy Uwe Boll movies combined. Why? Because when you go to see an Uwe Boll movie you know you are in for a pile of tax evading manure, but Pixels has the gall to sit you down in front of its screen and lie to you.

Yes you, the grown-up socially well-adjusted movie going gamer who is looking for another movie along the lines of Scott Pilgrim VS. The World and Wreck-It Ralph that understands gamer culture. Pixels bills itself as a movie for you, but in reality, it’s snickering to itself and making fun of you the whole time.

The plot of Pixels is stupid and makes no sense, but that’s par for the course for an Adam Sandler movie. An alien race has mistaken images of video games for a declaration of war, so they model their invasion after these video games and also sort of follow the rules of these video games. Maybe? I don’t know. Frankly, Futurama did it better.

Anyway, president King of Queens, Kevin James, has to put together a crack team of former master gamers to fight the invasion, and this is where it becomes clear that the movie is not written for gamers, but rather from the perspective of someone on the outside looking in, someone whose only exposure to gamers are the “lives in their mother’s basement” stereotypes that late night news shows and episodes of Law and Order like to show.

Gamers have a habit of being shown as somewhat socially awkward in movies, and that would be fine, but Pixels’ portrayal of gamers paints them as wholly dysfunctional. The most successful gamer is Sandler’s character who, at best, has nothing going on in his life and, at worst, is stuck living in the past to the point where he harms himself. The other characters we get are a conspiracy theorist who has lost touch with reality and an actual criminal! Nobody is a “good” person here. It’s like the very premise of the plot mocks us, jeering, “Ha ha, look at those gamers! They all grew up to be broken and weird!”

And the major plot arcs for these characters aren’t actually about using their gaming prowess to save the world. Yes, they do that, but only on the most shallow of aesthetic levels. Sandler’s character, instead, eventually learns to “grow up” and give up his attachments to the past, while other characters follow such wonderful plot arcs as, “Hey guys, look, I’m cool enough to get laid now, and by a video game character no less!” But even this plot arc paints a new relationship as some fiat for the way the video game invasion works, not because any character has actually learned how to talk to women in any way, shape, or form.

It’s as if the moral of the story is actually that games are for children, so these guys have to learn to grow up. That’s both internally inconsistent as gaming is what saves the world in this movie, and externally inconsistent, as the whole reason this movie could turn a profit is because gaming has become so ubiquitously mainstream that everyone knows who Donkey Kong and Q*Bert are!

The writing makes it all the more obvious that this was written from the outside looking in. None of the jokes take advantage of inside jokes that gamers actually tell amongst themselves. Heck, they barely joke about video game conventions such as extra lives, continues, quarters, or even the crappy online gaming communities of today. Instead they decide to fall back on basic low-brow humor including pee jokes, jokes about women, Asian stereotypes, and more half-assed humor that falls incredibly flat.

This is particularly evident because no actor appears to actually be trying in this movie, and so the punchlines never hit home. Sandler himself gives a performance with barely any emotional affect. It’s like no one actually wants to be here, phoning in their performances and hoping to get their paycheck so that they can move on with their lives and pretend this never happened.

The shallow references to gaming culture are saturated throughout this movie, hoping to make the audience go, “HA HA HA, I AM AWARE OF THIS GAME’S EXISTENCE!” rather than actually making them identify with the characters or plot in any way. Apparently merely referencing something nostalgic can take the place of an entire script these days. Thanks, Family Guy.

Adam Sandler’s Pixels is a Slap in Our Faces

That’s part of why this movie is such a stink bomb – it barely even cares about its own plot! The love interest in the movie is a military commander who learns that geeks aren’t so bad after all before falling for Sandler for absolutely no reason. Q*Bert is a kooky side character for basically no reason other than, “It worked in Wreck-It Ralph!” The references make no sense, and the writers know it! You may have seen that one scene from trailers where Sandler comments, “Pac-Man’s a bad guy?” as he climbs into a car painted like one of Pac-Man’s iconic ghosts. Yeah, Sandler, we don’t get it either. It’s like you threw together some video game imagery in the same old script you always write in an attempt to make a cheap buck.

And that’s exactly what this movie is, the same damn Adam Sandler movie we have seen before. Tell me if this plot sounds familiar to you. Adam Sandler plays an overly immature adult who has lost control of his life and has to go through some sort of conflict where he learns responsibility, gets a girl, and grows up, eventually leading a respectable life. Doesn’t that sound like every movie he has ever done? That’s because it is, and Pixels just paints it with a video game coat of paint, as opposed to the golf coat of paint Happy Gilmore had, the Hanukkah coat of paint Eight Crazy Nights had, or the thick self-loathing coat of paint that movies like Big Daddy and The Wedding Singer have.

The catch is that this coat of paint comes at your expense. It’s mocking you. It’s a movie made not for gamers, but for people who are tangentially aware of gaming. It exploits the fact that gaming has gone mainstream, allowing people who have no interest in this community or industry to simultaneously feel comfortable in their superiority over the socially maladjusted gamer stereotype while getting a blast of nostalgia when they see Donkey Kong take the screen. It’s pretty much the antithesis of the short film it was based on, which was a love-letter to video-game culture, not a bathroom stall drawing of a space invader like this movie is.

In short, don’t see this movie. It’s not worth your time and it does far more damage to the gaming community that it pays homage to it. It’s the schoolyard bully, making fun of you for bringing your Gameboy to school, except instead of taking your lunch money, this time he’s taking $12 for a movie ticket, and $10 more for snacks out of your pockets.

P.S., Peter Dinklage? What the hell, man. You are better than this. You are in Game of Thrones. What bet did you lose that got you playing a hacker with a mullet in an Adam Sandler movie?

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