IMPress Polly
07-27-2015, 05:52 AM
I don't normally do film reviews here in the Gaming Room, but since the new movie Pixels is all about video games, gamers, and gaming culture and history, I figured there would be no more appropriate place. Besides which, as gaming is one of my all-time favorite hobbies, I HAVE to remark on it in some way.
The trailer for Pixels casts it as a celebration of retro-gamers, so going into this movie, I was hoping that it might serve as the beginning of a cultural dialogue between old retro-gamers who can't appreciate art and people like myself who greatly value things like storytelling, atmosphere, and thematic alignment between narrative and game play structure. You know, a debate between people like me and the proverbial Cranky Kongs of today. Some of the movie gave me some hope for that: namely a scene wherein our retro-gamer protagonist gets into a debate with a kid playing The Last of Us about how the patterns that existed in the old arcade classics of the '70s and early '80s were what made games geeky fun to play because it turned them into math equations. This short little debate comes to a somewhat interesting conclusion near the end of the film wherein our protagonist is forced to apply the kid's argument in favor of the immersiveness that unpredictability can offer in the original Donkey Kong in a message that might serve to bridge the gap between "old school" gamers and people like me to a degree. Unfortunately though, these two fleeting scenes are the only interesting ones in the film from a gaming culture perspective.
In essence, Pixels is a movie for ignorant people who know little to nothing of gamer culture and the history of video games in that it relies on massive doses of audience ignorance in order to work. You have to be willing to accede to the argument that eSports were big in 1982 and no longer exist today (practically the opposite of the truth), to believe that cheat codes existed in '70s arcade games, that there were two versions of the original Galaga, that Duck Hunt came out in 1982, not 1984, that you beat Donkey Kong by throwing a hammer at him, that there were "Dojo Master" and Smurfs arcade games that never existed, that the PlayStation (not PlayStation 4, mind you, but "PlayStation") is the latest game system in the market, and mountains upon mountains of other contrived conveniences that bear no resemblance to the actual history of video games. Even Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani's heavily-advertised cameo appearance is fake: he is portrayed by actor Denis Akiyama. *crosses arms* No respect!
The storyline, or what excuse there is for one anyway, is just a lazy excuse to have a bunch of giant, pixelated game characters from the 1970s and early '80s (both real and imagined) appear in the real world to be destroyed by a team of "arcaders" including the 1982 world champions. The sophomoric "humor" is very much in the style of Adam Sandler films (this being one, after all). The jokes, in other words, are people getting injured, people getting drunk, women getting sexually harassed and inexplicably liking it, fat people, little people, people yelling louder than the context merits, that sort of thing. But there are video game characters (some of whom aren't even real), a fake cameo, lots of product placement, and big explosions, so that makes up for the lack of a coherent plot, atmosphere, and character development; you know, the stuff that makes a good movie. Right? :rollseyes:
"Summer popcorn movies" they call these types of films. I just call them Hollywood gimmicks.
The trailer for Pixels casts it as a celebration of retro-gamers, so going into this movie, I was hoping that it might serve as the beginning of a cultural dialogue between old retro-gamers who can't appreciate art and people like myself who greatly value things like storytelling, atmosphere, and thematic alignment between narrative and game play structure. You know, a debate between people like me and the proverbial Cranky Kongs of today. Some of the movie gave me some hope for that: namely a scene wherein our retro-gamer protagonist gets into a debate with a kid playing The Last of Us about how the patterns that existed in the old arcade classics of the '70s and early '80s were what made games geeky fun to play because it turned them into math equations. This short little debate comes to a somewhat interesting conclusion near the end of the film wherein our protagonist is forced to apply the kid's argument in favor of the immersiveness that unpredictability can offer in the original Donkey Kong in a message that might serve to bridge the gap between "old school" gamers and people like me to a degree. Unfortunately though, these two fleeting scenes are the only interesting ones in the film from a gaming culture perspective.
In essence, Pixels is a movie for ignorant people who know little to nothing of gamer culture and the history of video games in that it relies on massive doses of audience ignorance in order to work. You have to be willing to accede to the argument that eSports were big in 1982 and no longer exist today (practically the opposite of the truth), to believe that cheat codes existed in '70s arcade games, that there were two versions of the original Galaga, that Duck Hunt came out in 1982, not 1984, that you beat Donkey Kong by throwing a hammer at him, that there were "Dojo Master" and Smurfs arcade games that never existed, that the PlayStation (not PlayStation 4, mind you, but "PlayStation") is the latest game system in the market, and mountains upon mountains of other contrived conveniences that bear no resemblance to the actual history of video games. Even Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani's heavily-advertised cameo appearance is fake: he is portrayed by actor Denis Akiyama. *crosses arms* No respect!
The storyline, or what excuse there is for one anyway, is just a lazy excuse to have a bunch of giant, pixelated game characters from the 1970s and early '80s (both real and imagined) appear in the real world to be destroyed by a team of "arcaders" including the 1982 world champions. The sophomoric "humor" is very much in the style of Adam Sandler films (this being one, after all). The jokes, in other words, are people getting injured, people getting drunk, women getting sexually harassed and inexplicably liking it, fat people, little people, people yelling louder than the context merits, that sort of thing. But there are video game characters (some of whom aren't even real), a fake cameo, lots of product placement, and big explosions, so that makes up for the lack of a coherent plot, atmosphere, and character development; you know, the stuff that makes a good movie. Right? :rollseyes:
"Summer popcorn movies" they call these types of films. I just call them Hollywood gimmicks.