Review: Pixels
Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 7:38PM 
Tim here. There's a good movie to be made out of Pixels, and it would be the easiest thing in the world to get there. First, keep all of the visual effects setpieces from the movie as it exists, for they are surprisingly beautiful and convincing considering how much lower the film's budget than the usual summer tentpole. Second, make exactly the opposite choices that the filmmakers actually did, because there's literally not one thing about the plot, characters, tone, morality, or basic comprehensibility about Pixels in this form that works.
The film began life in 2010 as a lovely little conceptual short by French filmmaker Patrick Jean (which you can watch here, and have a far more enjoyable 2.5 minutes than anything in the lugubrious 105 minutes of the feature), whence it was almost immediately nabbed by Adam Sandler, who wanted to transform it into a feature. And that's really sad, because of all the changes that would have clearly benefit Pixels at some stage in its development "don't make it an Adam Sandler vehicle" is unquestionably at the top of the list. [More...]
It's a peculiar monstrosity, in which Sam Brenner (Sandler), a video game champion during his teen years in the early '80s, is called upon by his dumpy buddy Will Cooper (Kevin James), now President of the United States - a contrivance from which the film is never able to recover - to help save the world. See, an alien race received our transmissions of video game footage in the early '80s and took it as a challenge to attack. So they use their highly advanced ability to form energy into cubes - voxels, technically, not pixels - and they form those cubes into three-dimensional versions of '80s arcade figures, who come to do battle with the ill-prepared human military.
Lt. Col. Violet van Patten (Michelle Monaghan) quickly leads an R&D team to build an energy gun that can disrupt the alien cubes, but it will take a genius arcade gamer to know how to use that technology to beat the aliens. And luckily, the president's buddy is just that genius. How this will work in tandem with the antagonistic sexual tension between Cooper and van Patten is anybody's guess, by which I mean that the second Monaghan appears onscreen and Sandler makes all sorts of leering, drooling faces at her, you're able to guess.
There's no more emblematic flaw that points to the film's laziness and self-regard than its insistence on welding the helpless Monaghan into the unenviable position of playing the woman who just can't help herself from being attracted to the life force that is Sandler at his most disengaged and inarticulate (you would never know he originated the project, based on how mopey he is onscreen). It is astonishing. The nominally comic actor pushes through the role with a single, unyielding sense of bitterness, as though trying to make any of the scripts theoretical jokes play as funny was a disgusting idea to him.
But there he is, anyway, as Our Guy battling for the girl. It is all very dismal, at a level that goes beyond the usual "women in movies are objects to be won by vaguely unpleasant men" boilerplate. Brenner is viscerally repellent, both in his physical carriage and his defeated personality; trying to sell him as a romantic lead - even just the star of an enjoyable summer action-comedy, for that matter! - is a crime against decency.
It's next to impossible to tell who is supposed to find any of this interesting. Chris Columbus directs with all the slam-bang gee-whiz gusto that a filmmaker of his punishingly anonymous style can muster, and in concert with the film's broad-as-a-barn dialogue, this makes it impossible to assume that this is meant for anybody but kids. At the same time, the film is anchored to Brenner's perspective, and so indulgent towards the video game culture of the early '80s that it seems unlike that the filmmakers genuinely cared about bringing in any audience member under the age of 35. Who would hopefully be too old to put up with any of this boilerplate nonsense with inhumane characters.
But against all of that, I present the film's visual effects: loving and creative renderings of iconic characters who glow with diffuse internal light before collapsing into piles of shiny cubes. It's really beautiful, some of the best-looking CGI of 2015. That's not a whole lot, but- no, I don't have a "but". It's not a whole lot, and you can see enough of it in the film's trailer to get the best of the experience. Screw Pixels.
Grade: D
Reader Comments (5)
I think if anything has Adam Sandler's name attached to it. It's fucked. It's a warning to every filmmaker out there. Just don't work with Adam Sandler. He's cinema kryptonite.
Why are people still giving money to anyone who wants to make a movie with Adam Sandler as the headliner? Aside from the fact that this film most likely was going to be stupid regardless, attaching his name to it was like explicitly saying, "No one see this POS."
I kind of thought the concept of this originated with Futurama?
I had no idea that Kevin James was the prez in this film, that does sound like a ridiculous error.
They should have asked Chris Pratt to star
"There's a good movie to be made out of Pixels" - Yes, there is. And, it has already been made: It's called THE LAST STARFIGHTER.