This just in: Pixels, the latest half-hearted cinematic time-killer starring the sad sack once known as Adam Sandler, is bad. It is bad, bad, bad. The script adheres to no sense of internal logic; the film expects audiences to accept that Paul Blart, Mall Cop has been promoted to Paul Blart, President of America Cop; and Q*bert pisses himself. It’s a hostile, unfunny, dull, regressive dud from a creative team that clearly couldn’t have given less of a damn about the finished product. Thanks to a deluge of negative reviews, the general public caught a hearty whiff of the shit-smell emanating from this massive turd and dealt it a relatively paltry opening-weekend haul of $24 million on an $88 million production budget.
The outmoded gender politics of the film have not gone entirely unremarked upon as a single dimension of Pixels’ richly multifaceted badness, but they’re symptomatic of a much larger problem in modern studio filmmaking. Pixels boasts a threefer of sickeningly flat female characters with unconvincing, stunted love stories, but the truly agonizing thing is that none of them need to be in the film. High on the litany of ailments Pixels suffers is a chronic case of Needless Romantic Subplot Syndrome.
Wikipedia (not exactly the authority on such things, but as fine a place as any to start) categorizes Pixels as a “science fiction comedy film.” While the designation of ‘comedy’ may be a little generous, it is indeed true that the involvement of an alien species places this under the umbrella of sci-fi. Nowhere in the description does it Wikipedia acknowledge the inclusion of romance in the film, however. And that’s fair, seeing as the Adam Sandler/Michelle Monaghan, Paul Blart, President Cop/Jane Krakowski, and Josh Gad/Sexy Computer Woman romances don’t define the tone or plot trajectory of the film.
This raises the question of what, exactly, these romances add to Pixels. As the film scrolls through its prohibitively stupid setpieces like the slides of a PowerPoint presentation, the lovey-dovey bits stand out as the most heinous. Monaghan’s lieutenant colonel receives the most lines, but her character is a conglomeration of toxic lady-stereotypes. When the Sandman first meets her, this military weapons specialist has holed up in her lavish walk-in closet with a bottle of vino for a good cry over her pending divorce. Somehow, Monaghan’s character manages to play into both the hysteria- and humorlessness-based clichés about female characters in the film’s 100 minutes. At least she fares better than poor Krakowski, reduced to a two-line role as President Blart’s First Lady. Even worse, Spring Breakers’ Ashley Benson just has to show up and look good for her role as Lady Lisa, a video vixen sprung to life. She doesn’t have any lines, and in case the creator’s flagrant disregard for female characters wasn’t abundantly clear, she is literally awarded as a trophy to Gad in the film’s final scenes. Aside from the surreal horror of their bastard half-Q*bert, half-human progeny (long story not nearly worth explaining here), the sum total of these romantic elements is a big nothing.
Somewhere along the line, the people responsible for making movies got the idea that any well-rounded blockbuster needs a bit of romance. There’s this poisonous notion that the well-made tentpole must have a little something for everyone, lightening the central adventure with comic relief and diversions into romance. It’s true that the injection of a bit of levity can work wonders on a picture; DC’s new hard-and-fast “no jokes” edict has produced some material so desperately serious it veers back into unintentional (and intentional) comedy. The source of trouble for Pixels, and for the ever-expanding list of films also suffering from Needless Romantic Subplot Syndrome (NRSS) — to wit: Magic Mike XXL, Ant-Man, Jurassic World, and that’s just this summer — is that incorporating romance requires far more thought and commitment than most writers are willing or able to expend. It’s no trouble to massage a few laughworthy one-liners into the script, but constructing a romance requires its own subplot, believable characters, and most critically, a dynamic between the romantic leads that would conceivably breed intimacy. Sandler and Monaghan’s characters have zero chemistry, nothing in common, and while it makes eminent sense that he’d feel an attraction towards her, the converse defies reason. They fall in love because they’re the main characters, and that’s what main characters do. It doesn’t matter that these people wouldn’t express interest in one another over the span of a million years; the invisible hand of the scriptwriter pushes them together, because the imagined audience clamoring for a side of passion with their Pixels must be appeased.
The implications of NRSS go deeper than mere poor storytelling. These peripheral romantic subplots provide lazy writers with a cheap, perfunctory method of integrating women into a script. It’s a back door, an easy way out of writing substantial roles for actresses. When they can’t be cast aside as wives, girlfriends, or sex objects, there’s nothing left to do with women but actually — gulp — treat them as fully-formed and independently existing humans.
You’ll notice that the sorry phenomenon of NRSS doesn’t go both ways, either. No other genre does this. It’s not as if movies that clearly declare themselves to be rom-coms figure that they’ve got to toss in a scene of action just to placate their viewers. If, say, Trainwreck had thrown in a couple of high-speed car chases out of nowhere, audiences would be understandably confused.
And so today, Movie Mezzanine calls for the wholesale abolition of the NRSS, that constant scourge on American studio filmmaking. Let our main characters move through their plots unencumbered by unnatural flirtations. Let our female characters enter the film through more organic, meaningful avenues than Person Hero Falls In Love With. And if a film must pursue romantic ambitions, let them be more fully baked than those on display in Pixels.
