The world famous Ms. Kisner reviews Pixels, an abomination of sorts.
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| "Give daddy a hug!" |
With Pixels,
Hollywood has put the final nail in the coffin of popular nerd culture in
movies. Video games have come a long way, from being the domain of dank
basements and cramped arcades to occupying a space in almost every home in
America. They are a big business now and they garner millions of dollars every
year, with each blockbuster game costing more to make than the last. As a
whole, movies based on video game franchises have not been good, Super Mario Bros and Street Fighter being some of the worst
examples, but at least they tried somewhat
to stick to the source material. Pixels
is the cinematic equivalent of a shady pimp that whores out classic gaming icons
to the lowest bidder. “Oh you like
Pac-Man? He’s right here for you, man. Ten bucks and he’ll do anything you want
for an hour and a half. If you’re into
threesomes, I can get Donkey Kong in that action for a little extra!”.
In a world where Paul Blart (Kevin James) is president of
the United States (seriously, I’m not making this up), aliens are attacking the
planet with video game characters and only prodigy gamer Adam Sandler, the guy
from Game Of Thrones (Peter Dinklage) and low budget Jonah Hill (Josh Gad) can
save us. It’s literally the same plot as the Anthology of Interest II episode of Futurama except it lacks all of the sharp writing and witty humor
from that show. The premise could have been interesting if one single person in
the production of this film gave an iota of shit about video games, but it’s
painfully obvious that nobody cared. Every single actor is phoning it in, and
it’s excruciating to have to watch each and every “joke” uttered struggle and
die, shuddering as it gasps its final breath. It’s the absolute bottom of the
barrel pandering I have ever witnessed, and I’m sure each line of script was
ran through a focus group over and over again until it became the utter
incarnation and definition of lowest common denominator.
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| "Oh, look up there. That's my old career." |
They might as well have just made a Power Point slide
presentation with pictures of video game characters and had Adam Sandler point
at each slide and screaming “HEY REMEMBER THIS?!” It’s a wholesale decimation of everything that
gamers hold sacred and it’s terrible for the same reason that Big Bang Theory is terrible: it’s fake
geek culture. The acting is awful, the writing is appalling, the story is
dreadful, and the soundtrack is all of the most clichéd ‘80s songs imaginable. On
almost every single level Pixels
fails, like a layer cake where each layer of frosting is made out of different
kinds of feces. The ONLY good thing is
the special effects for the video game characters. Though the film is called Pixels, since the 2D game characters
inhabit a 3D world, they are made up of voxels, or tiny cubes. It looks awesome, and is the only thing that
kept me from committing seppuku while watching this film in the theater.
-Michelle Kisner
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