a movie paying tribute to 80s video games was always going to attract my attention, but to be honest with you I never expected the film to be anywhere near as good, or even as silly, as this one. Actually, when it comes to silliness I probably shouldn't have been at all surprised, especially since we have a movie where the characters from these old video games attack Earth, and any movie in which the major characters are chasing Pacman around New York City in coloured mini coopers is definitely not going to be on the serious list.
However, when it comes to silly movies there are those that are just plain silly and you spend the entire movie shaking your head wandering what possessed even the conservative powers that be in Hollywood to come up with such a concept, and then you get classic Adam Sandler. In fact, ever since The Waterboy I simply no longer expected Sandler to come anywhere near the level of the films that launched him to stardom – yet here we have Pixels and here we have Sandler back to his hilarious best.
Yep, that's right – not only is the film about how characters from 1980s video games invade the Earth, but it is actually really, really funny as well. Okay, at the beginning where we are introduced to a young Sam Brenner who knows how to beat video games by reading the patterns but losing to a dwarf at the world championships and thus being only the second-best video gamer in the world, it seems that it is simply going to be your standard silly movie. However jump to the present where it turns out that Sam Brenner's best friend has become the President of the United States, and they still catch up for a regular chat, you suddenly realise that it is going to be one of those movies and you know that you aren't supposed to take it seriously.
This film brought back an awful lot of memories, but then again I suspect that this was the film's main purpose: to remind us children of the 80s of all the fun that we used to have down at the video arcades playing classic games such as Space Invaders, Frogger, and Centipede. Sure, you can still play those games over the internet, but as Sam suggested, games these days simply aren't the same. They don't run on patterns but rather on the principle of trying to stay alive as long as possible (and if that doesn't work then pressing the reset key). In fact they brought back lots of the characters that we remember from the golden days of computer gaming, including Donkey Kong (which was one of the original platform games).
I guess I can also relate to Sam somewhat, being a kid who spent as much time as possible trying to beat computer games and then landing up in an ordinary job simply because computer game skills are simply not transferable. Sure, Sam is a computer geek, but his best friend became the President of the United States while he is installing hardware in people's houses. He even displays the geeky tendencies of simply not being able to relate to women in the way that most people are able to relate to them (though a part of that has to do with the silliness of the entire film). Of course, it does run along the standard Hollywood storyline where the protagonist, whom society has passed by, becomes the saviour of the world (and gets the girl in the end).
While I don't want to spoil the film, I have to say that I loved the end credits. Once again it brings back memories of the days when computer graphics were incredibly basic – not the almost life like incarnations of games that you get these days. While it is promoted as a kids movie (particularly with the trailers for the films at the beginning), in many ways this is a film for those of us who spent way to much time pumping quarters into games at the local video arcade, or stuck in front of our Commodore 64s relentlessly trying to get that frog across the road.
Alarms started to ring during the opening sequences, as we watch home recordings of a family hanging out at the park and going on holidays. Great, another found footage zombie movie? Oh no, it's much worse than that. Pandemic is a First Person zombie movie. For the most part, the only camera-work we get is on top of characters heads, in an attempt to give us their point of view. Problem is, that doesn't work in a movie with multiple characters (Have yet to see Hardcore Henry, so jury's out on whether it can actually work or not). See, with multiple characters, it's nice to see them and their reactions to situations. This creates an atmosphere where the viewer is blissfully aware that these characters spend half the time looking at each other...in a zombie apocalypse.
The other, and probably more irritating problem with multiple first-person viewpoints is the action scenes. Spoiler alert: They're a mess. If you thought shaky-cam footage was often hard to follow in action sequences, try shaky-cam footage from different places, looking at different things, quickly cutting from different angles and viewpoints without rhyme or reason. It's not long in the movie before our cast of characters are assembled on a bus and set out into LA, except before they get there, they have to battle through a horde of infected hanging around inside a tunnel. It's dark, there are two doors at opposite ends of the bus under siege, there are four different characters with their own dedicated camera trying to fight them off with baseball bats and shotguns. I almost turned it off there and then. I couldn't make heads or tails of what the hell was actually going on, as it all just merged into a nonsensical dark grey blur.
There isn't a single likable character either, each of them succumbing to horrific stereotypes in the façade of a development. The black dude is, for all intents and purposes, the black dude. He's strong-willed and intimidating, and is in search of his wife who went out on the patrol before him, but he just acts like your stereotypical black dude. The driver is a weedy ex-con, who is as brash and abrasive as ex-con stereotypically are, with no real consideration for his colleagues. Although he does want to make a change in his life, so that counts as development right? The worst is our main viewpoint; Lauren, a CDC doctor who has an unhealthy obsession with mobile phones. Yeah, I get that she's a mother who cares about being reunited with her daughter more than anything else, but Jesus Christ you're on a patrol mission of high importance. Leave the goddamn phones alone!
Pandemic isn't a complete failure though. Not entirely. It's treatment of zombies and infected is definitely interesting. It's nothing particularly revolutionary, but the world it presents is a little more believable than most other zombie movies that turn you from healthy to infected to zombie in little to no time at all. Instead in Pandemic, there are five stages of infection, and as such, the streets are still inhabited by fairly regular people just trying to find a way to survive. Some resort to violence, some resort to cannibalism, but most just hide in churches and car parks waiting for the inevitable; everyone in this world is homeless. The first time we encounter a stage five in the wild is also quite creepy, thanks to a lack of light, and it's gaunt, pale body blindly wandering around searching for it's targets. I mean it's ruined by a jump-scare that doesn't make any practical sense, but up until that point was probably the most entertaining sequence in the whole movie.