One thing Hollywood is good at is the thorough remake/remodelling of the history of urban culture. The arcade games of the 80s first got their Tinseltown treatment back in the day, with fair (Tron, Steven Lisberger, 1982) to middling (Electric Dreams, Steve Barron, 1984) results. Over 30 years on Chris Columbus has returned to the subject, being the second resuscitation of 80s pop iconography this year after the vastly superior Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015) which also recently graced these pages.
Pixels is the 16th feature film directed by Chris Columbus, who has under his belt over 3 decades of directing, producing and sometimes writing low brow family entertainment (e.g. the Home Alone series) which tends to get cornier the more Columbus contributes, having notably produced 3 and directed 2 instalments of the Harry Potter franchise, which I never saw since I boycotted Potter from day one due to prejudices too trivial to elaborate upon here.
Pixels tells the story of former teenage arcade video game champs Sam Brenner (Adam Sandler) and Will Cooper (Kevin James) who grow up to be, respectively, TV repair man and POTUS. As the Earth is being attacked by arcade game monsters (Space Invaders, Pac Man, Krazy Kong) because aliens caught images of those games and misunderstood them to be a signal of hostile intentions (there might be a lesson somewhere here) subsequently somehow morphing them into real life baddies who turn everything they touch into pixels, POTUS recruits Sandler and a few other champs from the old days to defend the world (that is, NYC, as usual) from pixel destruction.
Very unexpectedly, considering the director's rather irksome track record, Pixels works rather well. Columbus emulates unpretentiously (trust me, you wouldn’t have it otherwise) the Steven Spielberg/JJ Abraham touch in style, structure and comedy to entertaining effect. Plus, the film made me wonder the following: the video arcade 80s are now so far from us in time as the 50s were back then, and I remember seeing 50s Hollywood movies or 80s emulations thereof/tributes thereto in those days and thinking that the era might look good on the screen, but was probably boring and conservative in the flesh back in the day. Well, if the 80s were anything to go by, that's simply not the case. So if they invent a time machine in my lifetime Ill go say hi to Eddy Cochran on my way to II Century AD Rome. So there.
Pixels had dismal reviews, because people are so ignorant. To put it simply: misplaced intertextual expectations risk distorting analytical perceptions by projecting into the aesthetic object value systems alien to the symbolic references of both the producer and the consumer of said object, resulting in an ultimately distorted evaluation. Or if you prefer poststructuralist jargon: this sort of stuff is better if you don't take it seriously and just enjoy the ride. MacMahonian judgment: Columbus did well, although John Landis would have done a lot better.