Pixels

Movie Review Written By: Adolph Vega

3D

I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the 3D visuals in this movie. At several points within this movie the alien space ships would fly in and out of the background and pop out. Other times pixel blocks would fly out at the audience. The videogame character Q*bert actually had most of his snout popping out in 3D and looked pretty nice. The 3D visuals are gimmicky but they are enjoyable and work well for this sort of movie and look sharp and vivid. The 3D presentation within this movie is well executed and adds to the enjoyment of the movie.

Final Verdict: Good 3D

Movie:

Typically I am not a fan of Adam Sandler and his style of comedy but occasionally he surprises me and this is an example of that. The movie starts is the early 1980's as a group of children compete for the arcade videogame world championship. The championship was recorded and sent into space as a time capsule of human culture for that era. Fast-forward to present day and space aliens are attacking the world using the video game arcade characters from the 1980's. Adam Sandler and his group of friends are the only hope to save humanity from the space alien invaders. This movie is actually inspired by a short YouTube video, which can be found here. An episode of the TV show Futurama also has very similar story line of this movie so this movie doesn't’ feel that fresh or new. The movie is presented as mostly a comedy with a few action set pieces. I found the comedy very basic and juvenile but I was surprised how many times the jokes worked. About half the jokes actually had me laughing and half had me rolling my eyes in disgust and disapproval. A select few jokes had me laughing pretty hard but those were very rare within the movie. The action scenes are very quick and do a respectable job of representing the videogames they came from. I did find the action scenes enjoyable but the film had too few action scenes. The movie also has a love story with Adam Sandler's character and it's fairly predicable and generic. The movie is fairly straightforward with no time is really develop the character or story. The movie used several pop culture references from the 1980's that I enjoyed. One element that I found annoying about this movie is large amount of plot holes. I am not usually one to nitpick story elements but this movie has many unexplained or poorly described elements within the story. One my biggest pet peeves within movies is when plot elements are made conveniently and easily and not earned with dialogue or quality story telling. One story element they try to explain is a twist that happens after halfway through the movie and it makes sense within the context of a videogame but makes no sense at all in the real world. I understand this is supposed to be just a goofy comedy but plot holes are lazy movie making and just shows a lack of effort. Convenient story elements become irritating and bring you out of the movie, which is exactly what happened for me. The movie feels very rushed and is a little too simple. I grew up in the 1980's and enjoyed seeing some of the characters come to life in this movie but I wish this movie were better made. Overall I enjoyed the movie but found it lacking regarding the story with too many convenient moments, several bad jokes and a rushed simple storyline.

Final Verdict: 6/10

Listen to my podcast review of Pixels here

Pixels official website