Pixels arrived in theaters on July 24, 2015, with a tagline that promised the planet itself was in play: “Play for the planet.” What the film actually delivers is a 106-minute comedy in which Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Michelle Monaghan, Peter Dinklage and Josh Gad defend Earth from arcade characters. The premise is not the problem. The execution is.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
The Time Capsule That Started a War
The setup comes straight from the film’s 1982 prologue. Sam Brenner and his friends Will Cooper and Ludlow Lamonsoff play at an arcade before Brenner enters a video game championship, where he appears to lose a Donkey Kong match to Eddie “The Fireblaster” Plant. Footage of the event goes into a time capsule and gets launched into space.
Decades later, an alien force misinterprets that videotaped footage as a declaration of war. It attacks Earth using technological recreations of the games, and the President of the United States assembles former arcade champions to lead the defense. That is a workable engine for a science fiction action comedy. Pixels just never gets the machine running.
Galaga, Arkanoid, and a Giant Pac-Man
The film’s structure is a tour of licensed 1980s arcade properties. An attack at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam resembles Galaga. The aliens demolish the Taj Mahal as Arkanoid. They strike Hyde Park as Centipede. In New York City, the Arcaders battle a giant Pac-Man using Mini Coopers as the ghosts.
Chris Columbus directs, from a screenplay by Tim Herlihy and Tim Dowling, loosely adapted from Patrick Jean’s 2010 French short film. Development began in 2010, when Sandler obtained the rights through Happy Madison Productions and hired Herlihy to write. Columbus came aboard in 2013, drawn to the nostalgic homage to Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Space Invaders — all licensed for use here.
That licensing is the film’s one unambiguous victory.
A Cast That Should Work Better Than It Does
Kevin James plays Will “Chewie” Cooper, the disliked President and Brenner’s childhood friend. Monaghan is Lieutenant Colonel Violet van Patten, a divorced weapons developer. Dinklage is Eddie, Sam’s former rival, a character loosely inspired by arcade champion Billy Mitchell. Gad is Ludlow, a conspiracy-obsessed genius with poor social skills. Brian Cox plays Admiral James Porter, who argues against reading the Guam attack as Galaga.
Sandler’s Brenner is an electronics installer in the present day. That is the joke the film keeps almost telling: the arcade champion grew up to install TVs.
What the Nostalgia Actually Buys
Production values are real. Principal photography ran three months in Toronto, with extensive night shoots and practical sets. Digital Domain and Sony Pictures Imageworks handled visual effects, building voxelized, three-dimensional versions of arcade characters to sit inside live-action footage.
| Element | What Pixels Has |
|---|---|
| Director | Chris Columbus |
| Writers | Tim Herlihy, Tim Dowling |
| Source | Patrick Jean’s 2010 short film |
| Runtime | 106 minutes |
| Theatrical release | July 24, 2015 |
| Studio | Sony Pictures Releasing |
Key facts
– Release date: July 24, 2015
– Runtime: 106 minutes
– Director: Chris Columbus
– Writers: Tim Herlihy, Tim Dowling
– Cast: Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Michelle Monaghan, Peter Dinklage, Josh Gad, Brian Cox
– Metacritic: 27/100
The nostalgia is the product, and it is thin. A giant Pac-Man chased by Mini Coopers is a visual, not a scene. Q*bert arrives as a trophy. The film treats each game as a set piece to be cleared rather than a joke to be built, and the result plays like a licensing catalog with dialogue between entries.
Pixels is not lazy in its craft. It is lazy in its thinking. The premise — the military recruiting arcade champions because only they can read the patterns — contains a real comic idea about expertise that the culture discarded and then needed back. The film finds that idea, holds it up, and drops it.
The score is 2.7 of 10.
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