Pixels (2015) – An alien race believes that transmissions of old video games are real, and are a declaration of war by Earth. They fight back using the images of the games as models for their own weapons. Three middle-aged men, who were gaming champions in their youth, fight to defend Earth.
Directed by Chris Columbus
Starring Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Peter Dinklage, Josh Gad, Jane Krakowski
Why I Liked It – It was fun to look at and listen to.
Two weeks in a row, two terrible sci-fi movies. This one is not quite as awful as last week’s, so I guess there’s hope.
It was cool to see the images of the old games like Pacman, Centipede and Frogger (among others) rendered in quality CGI, and the soundtrack was first rate.
This concludes the interesting part of this movie. Dear God, this script is dumb! The actors give their all trying to make it work, but it never happens. These days I’m about 50/50 on Adam Sandler. As I admitted earlier this year, “Happy Gilmore” pleasantly surprised me. So, I was ready to give this one a chance.
Silly me.
The script is based on a dumb concept. The idea that an alien race would have the intelligence and subtlety to create and send the video game inspired weapons across the immense distances of space, but would somehow miss the point that these were games never works for me. Even when I accepted it as an illogical starting point, the rest of the script remained stupid. It’s a long series of juvenile one-liners that aren’t funny even in the hands of the undeniable talent of the cast. The longer I watched, the more annoyed the movie made me. There’s an interesting and potentially funny concept here. There’s a solid cast that is more than capable of delivering on that promise. But there’s never any momentum built with any of the ideas. They offer something, it dies, and they move on to something else. An endless stream of lame one-liners and jokes will not deliver a cohesive winner of a movie. I quickly stopped paying any attention to the “story” and just watched for the cool graphics and the great music.
“Pixels” bombed in the U.S. and Canada, and was a modest success worldwide.
If you have a weekend or a rainy day, and you don’t much care about what you’re watching, this might be your movie. There are plenty of worse movies to watch, and the pictures and music are very cool. So, this one will fall at 2 ½ stars, between “Not Impressed” and “Worth A Look”. Whether you watch it or not is entirely up to you.
You can stream “Pixels” on Pluto TV, Tubi, Disney+ Hulu, Paramount+, Amazon Prime, Google Play, Apple TV and Fandango at Home.
Rating **/*** 2 ½ stars
Stories Are My Life 
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