The nostalgia of the past hits the late 80s.
What They Say:
From New Line Cinema and HBO Max comes “8-Bit Christmas,” a humorous and heartfelt look back at the adventures of childhood. Set in suburban Chicago in the late 1980s, the story centers on ten-year-old Jake Doyle’s herculean quest to get the latest and greatest video game system for Christmas.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
8-Bit Christmas is a kind of simple love letter to the Gen-X generation and some Millenials that grew up in the 80s with the third real wave of video games. With this taking place in the late 80s, I have to amid to not being a part of it as I never owned a Nintendo Entertainment System and only reluctantly bought a SNES later on. I had been a fan of things like Atari from years earlier, but I only got serious with gaming with the Sega Genesis and kind of got an SNES as a kind of pressure thing to be into what were very popular games and franchise that are still running these days. But I can completely connect with the basics of this film and I’ll be damned if the ending didn’t leave me feeling emotional.
The premise is really simple in that we’re introduced to Jake Doyle as an adult as he and his daughter are heading to his parent’s place for the holidays. With his wife set to catch up with them later in the day, the two arrive to nobody being home. His daughter isn’t happy about the whole thing because she’s being denied a cell phone by not being old enough and Jake decides that it’s best to tell the tale of a similar thing that happened to him. This is when it shifts from Neil Patrick Harris to young Winslow Fegley as we get ten-year-old Jake struggling with not having an NES in his life. This has all the basics of A Christmas Story in its design with the home life to some degree, the slate of friends, the problematic teacher at school, the bully, and even clothes to a degree because young Jake is wearing “girls boots” because his mother clips some serious coupons.
Now, Jake’s daughter calls out some of these things in the present to reconnect the viewer there and it makes for amusing moments, such as when he changes the story to wearing a bike helmet when he never did to wearing protection doing some woodworking and the like. It makes for some nice transition pieces and easy nostalgia while at the same time recognizing that, holy shit, a lot more of us should be dead based on how we lived back then. Just sheer luck, really. The mythology of the NES is paramount here as he plays it up as the holy grail of gaming – all while they play Paperboy in the present, and how at the time only the “rich kid” that they knew in school was the only one that had one. He even has a Power Glove later on, which plays out in comical if disturbing effect. The rich kid is one of several base caricatures that you get from Jake’s memory but it fits in with that rewriting of one’s history.
Personally, I was particularly amused by the whole King of the Mountain thing with the snowbank because I know we had high snowbanks back in the day but I also know my memory is fuzzy and altered by my own height as a child. But seeing it played here with such grandness, and having a bully in the mix that takes advantage of it, the film really hits that sweet spot that will bring back those kinds of memories. Jake’s regular attempts at playing it as he remembers while modifying it for his daughter so that he whitewashes his own problems definitely works and is part of the charm. Neil Patrick Harris can tell the tall tale just right with the perfect reasonableness in his ton to make you believe it.
The main problem that young Jake has is that he wants his own NES and his attempts at securing a promise from his parents goes well until they realize what it is that they’ve committed to. We don’t get an extended bit about games causing violence, though there are mild protests after an accident, but we do get the parental dislike of something they don’t understand and have no interest in allowing their kid to get into it because they’ve “heard bad things” about videogames. Anyone who was under twenty during this period heard this from a lot of adults from the Silent Generation and it really did make things difficult unless they were proactive and not just reactionary to the news or word of mouth. I was blessed to have parents that encouraged my gaming for both this kind of things and role-playing games, but I’ve known plenty of others were this film will really resonate as the kids come up with an array of plans to try and get their own NES.
There are a lot of things that will work for different people throughout this as it attempts to capture the magic of A Christmas Story while not coming close. The narration is solid enough and the interaction with his daughter during it gives it something a little more. But a lot of the film with Jake’s journey just doesn’t land well enough. It’s the kind of piece if this had been made ten years earlier or more, it might have resonated more, but part of it sadly just felt a bit tired and a little uninspired. It’s not a carbon copy of the other movie, but you can see so many traces of it but with trappings that just aren’t as strong to make it connect while the kids are doing their thing, whether it’s selling wreaths to earn one or a raffle or pooling their money for it. The supporting cast of kids are decent overall but they’re more like ticking off boxes in personality types more than anything else and they never get much to be really fleshed out beyond what you see in the trailer.
All that said, there is a not that works well as a whole. The relationship between Jake and his parents is the backbone of things upon which it all hangs to deliver the finale. It has a really good sequence that takes place in the past as Christmas arrives and lessons are learned, but it also delivers a second one in the present as everyone arrives that evening for dinner. I’ll admit, it’s this sequence that really did me in as it delves into some strong holiday family material and depending on your own situation may make you feel things that you weren’t expecting based on the first 90 minutes of the film. But Steven Zahn as the dad and June Diane Raphael as the mother deliver really good performances. I’ve liked Zahn for a long time and this is not his first dad role rodeo but he’s got the right knack for it. And the two together and the impact in past and present is what makes this film worthwhile if you’re looking for “that” holiday movie to watch with friends and family.
In Summary:
8-Bit Christmas caught a lot of attention with its trailer and rightly so because it does capture aspects of a time and place that a lot of kids went through. It delivers it in a just slightly over-the-top way with a mix of modern and nostalgia so that it works both for adults and the kids that they’re probably going to force to watch them with. Neil Patrick Harris is ideal for this kind of role and the kids handle themselves well overall. But it’s the adults that really hold it together. Winslow Fegley does a really good job as young Jake and while he does have to basically carry the film – and gets lost in the poster design – he’s got some potential here. Heck, he’s got three more films in post-production, so it’ll be interesting to see how he grows into things. Overall, I definitely had fun with the film but I don’t think we’ll see TBS or TNT running 24-hour-marathons of it anytime soon. Well, with Warner Bros. owning all of them and this film, maybe sooner than I expect.
Grade: B
Streamed By: HBO Max
