Sunday, September 13, 2020

Pixels (2015)



A short film hit the scene in 2010. It was called Pixels. It blended classic video game iconology with the real world, making it seem as through they were one in the same. It was one of those short films that managed to catch on with the general population. When something like that happens, studios quickly make sure to buy up the rights. Then they use those rights to make a feature length film that they can put into theaters and hopefully make a lot of money with.

Pixels was given the big budget, feature length treatment in 2015. Happy Madison was the production company behind it. Chris Columbus was the big name director hired to tackle it. Adam Sandler and a bunch of his buddies were tossed together to fill out the cast. And it made a modest amount. Critically, it didn’t do too well. Most modern-era Adam Sandler movies don’t. But it made back its budget and, seemingly, its marketing as well.

 
Adam Sandler would soon go on to an extended relationship with Netflix, the streaming juggernaut. It began as a four-film contract in 2014, was renewed for another four films in 2017, and renewed again in 2020. Pixels ended up being the final theatrical Happy Madison film prior to the contract coming into effect and it was the most Adam Sandler way to say farewell to theatrical audiences.
 
Pixels, much like the short film it was based on, brought video games into the real world. In 1982, there was a video game world championship that Sam Brenner (Anthony Ippolito) was a shoo-in to win. His friend Will Cooper (Jared Riley) and fellow competitor Ludlow Lamonsoff (Jacob Shinder) were rooting him on. Sadly, he lost to Eddie Plant (Andrew Bambridge) at a final game of Donkey Kong. Their competition was recorded and sent as a time capsule into outer space for any other life to see. Three decades later, aliens arrived and began attacking Earth as the video games they saw in the time capsule.

The entirety of the present-day story in Pixels could be laid out through the different video games that were represented by the aliens. There were five main alien attacks with five different video games taking the limelight. Each one was like a new level in the journey of the characters. They had to overcome the battles to go up against the final boss and beat the video game aliens once and for all.


Pixels began with the most fitting game for an alien invasion, Galaga. It was a game about stopping alien invaders from destroying humankind. At its core, that was the same basic story that Pixels had. The big difference was that Pixels had more resources to work with than an arcade game. Pixels could tell a full story with a bunch of set pieces, build characters, and feature recognizable actors and songs. Galaga had a limited number of sprites, limited music, and zero defined characters. There was a great difference between the two. But they were both about stopping an alien attack.

The Galaga attack set the entire present-day story of Pixels into motion. Will Cooper (Kevin James) was now the president of the United States of America. He recognized that the alien invaders resembled those of Galaga and called upon his friend Sam Brenner (Adam Sandler) to advise him, instead of Admiral James Porter (Brian Cox), who just wanted to blow things up. He teamed Sam up with Lieutenant Colonel Violet Van Patten (Michelle Monaghan), and also brought in Ludlow Lamonsoff (Josh Gad) to help. Together, that trio would try to save the world.


The second alien attack in Pixels wasn’t much. It was before anyone outside of the president and his friends thought that the aliens were a credible threat. The aliens were attacking as the game Araknoid, one of the many games where a player would bounce a ball off a paddle to break the bricks floating above. It was a strange game for the aliens to use in an attack because it was in 1986, and the aliens were basing their attacks on a time capsule from 1982. Strange timing aside, the attack didn’t mean much to the story other than to raise the stakes. It was a best of five competitive war and the aliens had now attacked and won twice. They only needed one more win to self-justify a full-scale attack on Earth.

The fear that the second loss put into the USA forces led to them believing that the idea of video games attacking Earth was credible. The military would listen to Sam and Ludlow as consultants, begrudgingly, because they couldn’t deny the similarities between the attacks and the classic arcade games. But they wouldn’t let Sam and Ludlow be in charge. The military had to save face. They needed to be the alpha, no matter what. They got their light blaster guns ready and headed to the United Kingdom for the next battle.


They stood on the battleground that the aliens had declared. The military stared up at the sky. As Sam Brenner tried to fill them in on a few possible games, they shushed him and said they didn’t need his help. An alien spacecraft approached. It set the stage for Centipede and began the assault on the United Kingdom.

Centipede was an important part of Pixels because it was the moment where things shifted from depending on the military to depending on old school gamers. There was one essential rule when it came to Centipede: don’t shoot the middle. To take down the centipede, the player must shoot from the head to the tail or from the tail to the head. Shooting the middle only split the centipede in half, making two centipedes. The military didn’t listen. They shot at anything. The moment that one guy was eaten by a centipede, Sam took a gun and started shooting the centipede himself. The military wouldn’t listen, so Sam was going to show them how it was done. Soon, he and Ludlow were the only two people on the battlefield because they were the only two who knew how the game worked. They had taken over for the military.

This was the first battle that was essential to the character work. The first two battles set up the story so that it could get to the point of the Centipede battle, but it was the Centipede battle that was important to the character arcs. Sam Brenner had never lived up to his potential. He was nearly a video gaming champion. His one loss had disappointed him so much that he stopped focusing on video games and became a house call tech support guy. The only people that respected him were Ludlow and Will because they had seen what he could do on an arcade cabinet. The moment he stepped up and took down the aliens in a game of Centipede was the moment that everyone saw what his potential could be. They saw him for what he was, rather than what he settled for. He was the hero they needed.


The fourth battle brought Eddie Plant (Peter Dinklage) back into the mix. For the first time since they came to Earth, the aliens had let the humans know what game was going to be played. It would be Pac-Man and it would be on the streets of New York City. Eddie Plant was a Pac-Man champion back in the day, so it only felt right to bring him in to compete against the aliens that were hellbent on destroying Earth. The problem was that Eddie was Sam’s main rival because of that defeat so many years before.

That only put three people on the team, though. The fourth was the creator of Pac-Man, there to go up against the wholesome character he created. The four of them would be driving cars that represented the ghosts from the original game. They would need to catch Pac-Man and “eat” him. If Pac-Man got a pellet, he would be able to eat them. The creator was quickly out of the battle, though, because he tried to talk to Pac-Man and reason with him. Pac-Man ate his arm and took off, leaving the three classic gamers to chase after him.

The Pacman battle solidified Sam Brenner as a hero, as he singlehandedly took down Pac-Man the third time after Ludlow’s car was eaten and Eddie drove into a river. That wasn’t the importance of this battle, though. There was another way that Sam’s character was able to grow due to what happened in New York. In a complete break of any form of reality, Eddie was able to zoom his car faster than physically possible. It was revealed at an afterparty that he was putting in cheat codes so that he could catch Pac-Man. They were the same cheat codes he had used in the 1982 tournament to beat the other competitors. Essentially, the aftermath of this battle revealed that he had cheated Sam Brenner out of a video game championship.


For things to come full circle, there had to be one final battle. A slew of video games attacked the streets. Ludlow and Eddie were protecting the civilians from the intruders. Meanwhile, Sam, Will, and Violet were beamed up to the alien mothership where they were forced into a game of Donkey Kong to save humanity. They had to make it up the ladders and levels to take down the giant ape that threw barrels at them.

This was the final piece of Sam’s character arc throughout Pixels. He had been defeated by Eddie in the final round of the 1982 video gaming tournament, during a heated game of Donkey Kong. Now he knew that Eddie cheated. Sam should have won. He got another chance to prove that he was the Donkey Kong champion by taking down the Donkey Kong aliens. And, instead of simply winning a tournament, he would save the world. It would be a much sweeter victory.


The entire story of Pixels was set up in the five different video games that the aliens used to attack Earth. Galaga represented the alien invasion that the movie would play out. Araknoid showed how high the stakes were. Centipede was about the gamers stepping up. Pac-Man focused on how Eddie was a cheater and Sam was not. Finally, Donkey Kong brought everything back home by showing that Sam was the true champion. Each game played its part to tell the whole story.

The final theatrical Adam Sandler movie from Happy Madison before the Netflix deal took effect was a solid enough one for people who enjoyed the Adam Sandler schtick. It fell into a few of his regular trappings, though. Jackie Sandler, Sadie Sandler, Sunny Sandler, and Jared Sandler were all there. The nepotism was running rampant. His friends were there too, with Kevin James playing a major role and Nick Swardson getting about ten seconds of screen time. There was the same 80s music that has filled every Adam Sandler movie since forever. And the jokes were… they were mostly bad. But it was a fun enough action movie starring the Sandman.

Studios will always look at popular short films to find intellectual property for their next feature. It happened with Pixels because of the success of the 2010 short film. It happened with Lights Out a couple years later. The quality of the final product will always vary depending on if the studio respected the original or if they were out for a quick buck based on the original’s success. But it’ll keep happening. Nothing will stop that.


Nothing will stop these notes, either:
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)