Pixels
Short description
In the 1980s, Sam Brenner and his friends were arcade champions, competing in tournaments and racking up high scores. Decades later, Brenner installs home cinema systems, while his childhood friend Will Cooper has become President of the United States. When aliens in space find a time capsule sent by the American government containing footage of classic video games, they misinterpret it as a declaration of war and launch an attack on Earth, modelling their assault on the games themselves. Conventional military force proves useless against the invaders, so Cooper turns to Brenner, who assembles a team of former arcade players, alongside weapons specialist Lieutenant Colonel Violet Van Patten, to take on the enemy.
Chris Columbus directed the film, the fourteenth of seventeen he has directed in chronological order, following Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief and preceding The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two. Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling wrote the screenplay, and Columbus produced with Mark Radcliffe and Adam Sandler. Adam Sandler plays Brenner, with Kevin James as Cooper, Michelle Monaghan as Violet, Peter Dinklage as Eddie, Josh Gad as Ludlow and Matt Lintz as Matty.
Made for a budget of 88 million dollars, the film took about 245 million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds 5.6/10 from roughly 178,000 votes, and on TMDB 5.8/10 from over 8,000 votes, while the critics' rating stands at 4/10 from 202 reviews, below the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Jennifer Aniston turned down the role that Michelle Monaghan eventually played.
- Although the film is called 'Pixels,' the attacking aliens are actually made of voxels.
- At the beginning of the film, when Adam Sandler’s character connects a PS4 to the TV, the TV screen shows the console menu. In the next shot, he’s holding the HDMI cable in his hand, but it’s not connected to the PS4.
- At the base, during preparations for the alien attack, a boy is playing The Last of Us, but when the shot changes, the DualShock4 is not lit up, even though the light bar should be active when playing.
- The film begins in the scorching summer of 1982. Young arcade gamers discuss pop stars, mentioning Madonna and Samantha Fox. However, Madonna's debut album was released a year later and went unnoticed at the time, and in that same anachronistic 1983, Samantha Fox's parents had just submitted her photos to the 'Face and Shape of 1983' novice model contest, so there was no talk of a musical career for Samantha at that time.
- The character of Dennis Akayama, Professor Iwatani, was based on the real creator of the game Pac-Man – Toru Iwatani.
- The surname of Josh Gad's character is Lamonsoff. This surname frequently appears in films with Adam Sandler and is a reference to his college roommate, Eric Lamonsoff.
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