1600 feet beneath the surface of
the Nevada desert, “Project Yellow Sphere” is nearing completion. This top secret undertaking is so massive
that the government funded Maze Compound has had to deplete the surrounding
areas of electricity to keep functioning.
No one quite knows the nature of these experiments or to what end they
are being conducted. Rumors of weapons
technology and artificial intelligence abound.
When a skeptical colonel is granted access, what he sees blows his mind,
and quells any doubts he has.
If you were a kid in the late 80’s,
chances are you encountered Pac Man.
Namco’s arcade game was a bone fide phenomenon. While the basic concept of the game (A yellow
orb maneuvers around a maze while devouring dots and running from ghosts) doesn’t
sound like the makings of an epic fan film, James Farr and Steelhouse Digital manage
to make it happen with PAC-MAN: The Movie. They do so by allowing Pac-Man to do the exact same thing by the exact same means as he does it in the real world.
The filmmakers avoid certain
obvious pitfalls in their adaptation. Most importantly, they don’t treat Pac-Man
as either the main protagonist or as an intelligent/organic life-form of any
kind. Nor do they attempt to realize
Pac-Man’s “world.” In the films
established reality, Pac-Man exists as a man-made creation, the main difference
being that in PAC-MAN the movie, he isn’t just meant for recreation. He actually serves a
purpose. His name is an acronym
which stands for Polymorphic Autonomous Compound MANipulator. He’s basically a computer generated weapon,
meant to seek out and consume various targets.
FX wise, the film maintains
fidelity with its basic concept. They
don’t try to make Pac Man look “real.”
He is very obviously computer generated, which is as it should be given
how the film explains him. The main set
piece is a sequence where Pac-Man does his thing in a giant maze as part of a
demonstration for the colonel. The whole
thing plays as homage to the Tron
films, particularly the Light Cycle match from the original. Pac-Man zooms around the maze, devouring dots
like a hoover vacuum. Unlike the game,
Pac-Man has arms and legs. These appendages come in handy when he performs a
flourish after eating a power pellet. There’s
also a nice touch borrowed from Tron: Legacy. Whenever Pac-Man chomps down on a ghost, blue
translucent liquid juts out from his mouth.
PAC-MAN: The Movie is a lot of fun.
If James Farr could somehow stretch this out into a full length feature,
I just might watch it. How a concept
such as Pac-Man could’ve been adequately expanded upon was likely anyone’s
guess up until now. The whole time, the
answer was to just keep it simple. Stick to the basics, and show the character
do exactly what he’s known for. James
Farr adapted a video game by making a movie about people designing and playing
a video game. He just changed the context
to weapons technology. It doesn’t get
any cleverer than that.
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