A little back story to this. I did a marathon on my Twitch.Tv channel of The Walking Dead episodes 1-5, made by Telltale Games. I fully got into this game, story, dialogue, characters and at the end I felt like I'd never been this emotionally challenged by a game. Choose who eats or not, who lives or dies, watching people make hard decisions for family and friends and the relationship of two people growing to the point where it you didn't want the story to lead to that point. To watch was hard, to choose (for me) was harder and I've never felt so conflicted (and in the end satisfied) playing a video game before. This song was playing during the credits of episode 5. So many feels to say the least.
I'm a big time fan of video games, as most of you probably know. Growing up we had NES, SEGA Genesis, SNES, N64, etc. I grew up playing Zelda, Super Mario Bros, Sonic the Hedgehog, Donkey Kong, Pokemon and everything else I could get my grubby little hands on. So when I first saw the trailer for Wreck-It Ralph, I had a fangasm like no other. This is the first movie since The Dark Knight, The Amazing Spider-Man and The Avengers that I was really looking forward to this year. At the risk of sounding fanboy-ish, this movie could be the best film of the year.
Wreck-It Ralph follows the story of a video game villain named after the movie's title, but we'll shorten it to Ralph (John C. Riley). In his game "Fix It Felix Jr.", which is located inside of Litwak's Arcade, Felix (Jack McBrayer) gets all the glory for being the hero while Ralph gets left out of everything. At a weekly video game villain support group in Game Central Station [a place where all the characters in the arcade's games congregate], Ralph tells everyone how today was the 30th anniversary of his game, but confesses [to the dismay of people like Bowser, Eggman and Zangief] that he's sick of being the bad guy and just wants a little recognition. On his way back home from the meeting we learn, from Sonic the Hedgehog, if you go outside of your own game and die that you won't respawn. When he pulls back into his own game Ralph sees that the people in the game are throwing a 30th anniversary party in Felix's penthouse, of which Ralph was not invited. He crashes the party and essentially ruins everything. Ralph leaves after being told that if he won a medal, like Felix, maybe everyone would like him more. This gives Ralph and idea that takes him out of his own game to "Hero's Duty" where he meets the overbearing Sergeant Calhoun (Jane Lynch). After being scared out of his mind by the gun-play, violence and aliens in the game he is yelled at by Calhoun. Ralph decides to forego the game play to get the medal, and does, but accidentally jets out of the game an escape pod, with alien young on his face, into the racing game "Sugar Rush." This is where he meets a young racer named Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman) who steals his medal to be able to enter a qualifying race. Ralph must get the medal back and get back to his game before the arcade shuts it down, but makes an acquaintance, in Vannellope, that will have him choosing whether to get the recognition he wants by saving a video game, going back to being a "bad guy" or being deleted forever.
There is not enough good I can say about this movie I don't think, but we'll start somewhere. The presentation (a lot of 8-bit style that I loved) looks amazing and all the characters, games, scenery, and colors are right on point. It was never a strain to see what was going on. The music was awesome too. From real life songs, to modern game soundtrack scores, to retro music as well, the music all around pleased me. I'm pretty sure there's not a plot or story like this one out there and hell there's even a twist in this that gave me quite the little surprise. In short, I loved the story and really got into it. I love video games and this story reminded me of something you could feasibly see in one. Now I'm not a huge fan of Sarah Silverman so I thought she'd be the "weak-link" of the voice actors, but everyone did well (Lynch, Riley and McBrayer included). No one felt out of place and it really seemed like they all knew what they were doing, especially John C. Riley who voiced Ralph. There were video game jokes throughout too, like seeing a Mushroom from Super Mario Brothers or once the arcade closes Ken and Ryu wanting to go to the bar, that made me smile. Speaking of smiling, there are a ton of laugh-out-loud moments and one-liners in this. From video game comedy to puns and word play, I was laughing pretty damn hard at parts of this flick. The dialogue was done perfectly. The video game cameos, I mentioned a few above, were AWESOME to see on the big screen as well. Pac-Man, Clyde, Dr. Eggman, Zangief, Bowser, Sonic the Hedgehog, Q-Bert and his gang, M. Bison, Ryu, Ken Masters, and I could go on and on and on with this awesome list. But there's some that you have to notice and get excited for in the movie yourself.
This is a movie I wholeheartedly recommend for everyone to go see. Whether you're a video game fan or not. There was an older couple at our showing, people that are my age and families who brought their kids. It's truly a movie for all ages. As I said above everything from the cameos to the design to the story is all perfect and I already wanna see this movie again. Wreck-It Ralph makes the movie lover in me jump for joy and the video game lover in me want to button mash. I would not hesitate to "Press Start" on this movie.
