8-Bit Christmas

Review: In this 2021 HBO Max release, we follow a young man who is on the hunt for a Nintendo NES for Christmas 1988. The story is told from the POV of the older version of Jake (Neil Patrick Harris) recounting the story to his daughter in 2021. The movie is pretty run of the mill and isn’t one I’ll revisit, though it had a couple fun moments. There were some really intense caricatures and other included details that made the movie feel very strongly like a memory being told by someone recounting their childhood memories. The film only has a few well known actors, with the mostly unknown cast helping making it feel a little more realistic. All that being said, it was a sweet Christmas movie that warmed the heart a tad with a solid ending, so I’ll call it a win. Stream it on HBO Max if you want to check it out for yourself.

High: I’d have to point as Harris’s future narration as the high for film. It was a great addition & internal monologue for what might’ve been an otherwise boring story. There were also some solid performance from the younger actors, though the standout onscreen performance for me came from Steve Zahn, who played Jake’s obsessive father. I also really liked the addition of David Cross’s character and that storyline!

Low: The movie uses the 1980s nostalgia bait like so many movies have used before it, though it was a lot less effective. Maybe people who actually lived through the 80s would disagree with me, but I think it was pretty apparent certain things were slid in just for that purpose. I would say it was less of a fault of this film & more of a fault of the state of movies that we’re still getting so many 80s nostalgia movies 40 years after the fact.

Rating: 6/10