Oh man I rolled out of my seat I was laughing so hard at that Power Glove scene!
I gotta admit there is a bit more to this movie than a feature length Nintendo commercial as some people claim. The Wizard is a good movie, very dated, very commercial, and yet at the same time actually has a really good story and characters. The story follows a young boy named Jimmy who has been traumatized by the death of his sister and sent to an institution, where his young brother breaks him out and they make a quest to California, where they meet a young girl and discover Jimmy is ridiculously good at video games. So the gang comes up with a plan to put Jimmy in a video game tournament while making their trek to Jimmy's true destination. The first thing I gotta tell you guys is these kids are awesome, you spend enough time with them to get to know them and see them as real people, they have baggage, they have history even though they are very young. True, they sometimes act more like adults than the actual adults but it's essentially a kids movie so I can forgive that. I don't know, I was just in a good mood watching this movie! It was a big deal when this movie came out, Nintendo was on top of the world with a massive dedicated fanbase, and the unveiling of a certain new game at the end needless to say made people lose their minds. The film has some cheese to it, but I would be lying to say it isn't fun. Hell, the villain of the movie has lived beyond all these years with the immortal line which causes head shakes and guffaws aplenty, "I love the Power Glove. It's so bad...". Sweet Jesus. And one thing I especially noticed is how much of a time capsule this is. The NES came out in 1985, this movie came out in 1989 still during it's golden years but not only the Nintendo fever that was being felt, but also the movie throws in this big chase through a Universal Studios amusement park so that adds another layer of that specific time. You can almost look at it from a philosophical view. Optimists would say it's cool seeing a part of the world in that particular time, whereas pessimists would say it's heavily dated and hurts the film in years to come. I am an optimist in this case, to see a world so heavily seeped in video games and to also see just as simple a thing as an amusement park is really neat to me. And even I have to admit the final scene does in fact choke me up a bit, which just goes to show how well the characters and relationships were built. It's a really good movie and one I would definitely recommend to younger kids, maybe it could get them into older video games or video games in general! It's a good family movie, and I do see merit in what others brush off as a long commercial. If you have the time or interest you should give it a watch, I don't think you will be disappointed. Plus I'll give you a buck if you ever dialed up the Nintendo tip hotline and probably racked your parent's phone bill up sky high!
