Tag: family

Nothing says “I might actually enjoy this movie” like watching a Christmas movie in March.

8-Bit Christmas (2021)

I am an 8-bit kid. I don’t really play NES games anymore, but I do fall asleep most nights to YouTube videos of young people playing video games that came out before they were born. So when I saw the title 8-Bit Christmas, I brought a lot of hope with me. I could easily imagine a version of this movie I would have loved. That is not this movie.

Instead, 8-Bit Christmas is basically a family-channel Christmas movie dressed up in Nintendo nostalgia. Neil Patrick Harris plays Jake Doyle, an adult reminiscing about how desperately he wanted an NES as a child in 1988. He tells the story to his daughter to explain why she cannot simply get everything she wants.

That setup could have worked. The problem is that the movie never seems to understand what made Nintendo feel magical in the first place. When Jake finally shows his daughter a game from his childhood, he picks Paperboy on NES—not Super Mario Bros., not Contra, not Bubble Bobble, or anything a normal child would use to explain why the system mattered. It is such a strange choice that it almost feels revealing. The movie is not interested in what kids actually loved about Nintendo. It is interested in using Nintendo as a generic symbol for “back then.”

And that leads to the movie’s real message, which turns out to be much drearier than the title suggests: You want a cell phone, kid? Get a job. For a Christmas movie about parents sharing the past with their children, that is a surprisingly joyless lesson. It is not even wrong, exactly. It is just hollow. The real issue with kids having cell phones was never simply that they were expensive.

The movie is basically A Christmas Story rewritten around an NES, but without the same specificity. That older film understood how completely a child could fixate on one object and make it feel mythic. 8-Bit Christmas keeps reaching for that feeling, but it does not seem to trust the reality of its own subject. The period details are shaky, the game choices are odd, and the whole thing feels assembled rather than remembered. For instance, the parents are up in arms over violence in video games. This did not happen in the 1980s. All that did not happen until the Clinton Administration in 1993. This aspect about the movie felt particularly false to me.

There are things I liked. I loved the costumes and casting all around. Everyone looked very stylish, though period appropriate. Jake winning an encyclopedia and then getting bookends for Christmas “because they have baseballs on them” is genuinely funny. Some of the parental details work too. But the spirit of the movie feels wrong. With a title like 8-Bit Christmas, this could have been several kinds of movie I would have happily embraced. The one it chose to be did not work for me.

4.5/10