President Paul Blart? There are a lot of things about Pixels’ premise that are hard to accept, but that is by far the hardest. Photos courtesy Columbia Pictures.
Critics are going absolutely apeshit about Pixels, and it’s a gigantic overreaction.
The movie follows Sam Brenner (Adam Sandler, who also produces), a competitive arcade gamer in 1982, into the present day as an abject failure — divorced, installing other peoples’ entertainment systems for a living. However, the 1982 world video game championships were sent into space as part of a package on global culture from that year intended to communicate with alien life. Aliens had found the probe and mistook it for a declaration of war — and, somehow, the terms of engagement for said war. Every couple of days or so, the aliens send down a squad to play out a life-size arcade game, and the first planet to win three games gets to destroy the other one. Brenner’s life-long friend Will Cooper (Kevin James), now President of the U.S., recruits him to fight off the invasion, alongside fellow childhood friend Ludlow Lamonsoff (Josh Gad) and rival Eddie Plant (Peter Dinklage).
One would ask how they think humans will destroy their planet, but these invaders are clearly not big on any kind of communication.
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