Pixels

The 8-Bit Afterlife of the Man-Child

Adam Sandler looks tired in *Pixels*. Not “long flight” tired—more like soul-deep fatigue. He spends the movie with his eyelids half-lowered, wearing the dull stare of someone who knows exactly what kind of machine he’s trapped inside. At times it honestly feels like he’s doing mental math on the catering while he says his lines. I’ve always thought Sandler can be an incredible dramatic actor (the coiled anger in *Punch-Drunk Love*, the frantic grit in *Uncut Gems*), but here—as a former arcade champ turned home-theater installer—his whole performance is basically one long shrug.

That sluggish vibe is weirdly the movie’s pulse, because everything around him is trying to be loud, bright, and frantic. Chris Columbus directs, and he’s the guy who helped bottle that warm Amblin-style 1980s nostalgia. *Pixels* is adapted from Patrick Jean’s clever 2010 short, and the setup is pure weaponized childhood: a 1982 time capsule with video game championship footage gets intercepted by aliens, who take it as a war declaration and attack Earth in the shapes of classic arcade characters.



To Columbus’s credit, the apocalypse imagery is genuinely fun. Instead of the usual Bay-style inferno, the destruction is blocky and physical. When a huge glowing Centipede hits London, or Space Invaders rain down on a base, things don’t explode so much as… break apart. Stuff gets voxelated. A bus doesn’t go up in flames; it fractures into thousands of bright cubes that bounce across the street like someone dumped a bin of Lego bricks. It’s playful and creepy at the same time, and it makes you think about the better movie hiding in here if it weren’t chained to the Happy Madison assembly line.

But it is chained to that line, so you get the usual arrested-development hangover. Kevin James is the President of the United States. (Just sit with that.) Sandler and James have to save the world with Josh Gad as a conspiracy guy who mostly yells, and Michelle Monaghan as a lieutenant colonel whose main job is to serve as negging fuel for Sandler. In *The Guardian*, Nigel Smith called it "casually sexist, awkwardly structured, bro-centric," and said anyone expecting a clever, knowing romp would be bitterly disappointed. Yep. Women in this script are either nags in the way or prizes at the finish line—literally, with the Q*bert character turning into a woman at the end.



There is, however, one stretch where the movie almost pulls itself together by shutting everyone up and letting the visuals work. The team has to chase a massive Pac-Man through Manhattan at night, and Columbus shoots it like a real tactical set piece, using tricked-out Mini Coopers as the “ghosts.” As that glowing yellow mouth tears through fire trucks and asphalt, washing the buildings in neon nostalgia, the film catches a groove. They even bring in a fictionalized Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man’s actual creator, who approaches Pac-Man with this sweet, paternal warmth—right before getting his hand bitten off into floating cubes. It’s dark, and it’s funny. For a minute you can see the sharper, stranger movie buried underneath.

Then the humans take over again. I don’t know what Peter Dinklage thinks he’s doing, but I can’t deny the commitment. Fresh off *Game of Thrones*, he plays Eddie Plant, a swaggering arcade rival with a mullet and a weird Southern-ish drawl, puffing himself up like he’s in a different film entirely. He’s clearly modeled on Billy Mitchell, the hot-sauce-hawking villain of *The King of Kong*. And when Dinklage starts demanding a conjugal visit with Serena Williams as his price for saving humanity, the movie stops being merely lazy and veers into something like a fever dream.



What you end up with is a movie that borrows the look of childhood joy to prop up a pretty cynical fantasy about middle-aged entitlement. Nobody really grows up in *Pixels*; reality just bends until it confirms that memorizing Galaga patterns was a heroic life choice. If that’s charming or unbearable depends on how much patience you have for Sandler-style wish fulfillment. When the credits rolled under a blizzard of 8-bit sprites, I wasn’t thinking about the games I loved—I was thinking about the actors. It’s a strange watch: all these adults fighting to save a world they seem, at times, genuinely bored to be in.