For the record, I haven’t been to a movie theater for over a year. The last movie I remember seeing in the theater was Robocop, which my fiance and I saw on our first Valentine’s Day together. Somehow, there just didn’t seem to be any better options at the time, but whatever. Don’t judge me.
Then, about a month ago or so, we were watching TV (I believe I was freaking out about a distinct lack of Game of Thrones for another year) when who should appear on the screen but Peter Dinklage! Peter Dinklage is amazing. There’s even a song about him. I’m really not sure if it was Peter Dinklage that caught my eye first or the giant freaking Tetris pieces flattening buildings. We recently dressed as Tetris pieces and ran around a convention for a weekend with the theme music playing, so Tetris holds a special place in my heart.
All conversation stopped. “We’re seeing that. In the Imax theater. Opening weekend,” I announced.
We didn’t quite make it for opening weekend. A variety of factors (mostly a combination of work schedules and laziness) forced us to go Monday instead.
We almost had the entire theater to ourselves. Granted, this was 4:00 in the afternoon on a Monday on a non-holiday weekend. Normal people don’t go to movies at that time, so that’s probably why it was so empty. I had also read a couple reviews that didn’t exactly speak highly of Pixels. Most of them were trying to take this movie waaaaay too seriously.
Pixels is a movie about classic arcade games coming to life. It is not a serious, mind-blowing type of movie. I really liked it for what it was. It was light-hearted, goofy, over-the-top and all the other things we’ve come to know and love about most Adam Sandler and Kevin James movies. Anyone who thought it was going to be serious in any way, shape, or form should have realized their error when it’s revealed that Kevin James was somehow elected President of the United States. That was all it took to give me permission to really just relax and not judge the movie for any non-believable parts (because there are plenty of those).
I think it was the absolute perfect movie to have in 3D. The cubes (looking very familiar to Whovians) were right in front of my face. I haven’t seen any 3D movies in theaters since I was a kid. I wear glasses and the old 3D paper glasses just didn’t work well for me. Since it’s been a while, I expected there to be a bunch of gag moments where things just shot out at the audience for the heck of it. There was none of that. The 3D was done just right. The video-game-alien-energy things looked real but not real at the same time, if that makes sense. Visually, it was a good movie. Not the best thing ever, but it was really good.
Some people were upset at the treatment of women in the movie. Those people had some good points. There’s pitifully few female characters and no female gamers. Most of the women in the movie are only there to help a man’s character arc. So this is not a gender equal movie, but, sadly, most movies aren’t. And I really can’t think of a way this movie would have worked if they had changed some of the roles. The main characters absolutely had to be ones that were at a 1982 arcade championship. Most early arcade champions were male. It’s only been within the past 15 to 20 years that girl gamers have been more than just the outsiders. That’s kind of like being mad at Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings for not letting the women take on leadership roles on their own merit; that’s just not historically accurate for the time period being portrayed. But I think the women that get caught up in the battle to save the planet could have been strong characters apart from the men. Did they really need to make the “sexiest Prime Minister” joke?
Overall, I really enjoyed Pixels. It wasn’t genre-redefining, but it wasn’t supposed to be. It’s a fun way to spend a couple of hours, especially if you can see it in theaters. It was well-worth the money. Peter Dinklage as a mulleted cyber-criminal was amazing. And Sean Bean played a hard-ass military man who SPOILER ALERT doesn’t die.
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