CineLinkr #132: The Story Behind the Puzzle
Spoilers ahead: for the puzzle and the movies/games
This post assumes you've already solved the puzzle. It reveals all categories and their connections, and discusses plot details, endings, and spoilers for featured movies/games throughout.
The Wizard reached cinemas before American players had seen Super Mario Bros. 3 in stores. The movie turned its final competition into a feature-length product reveal, which is either shameless or visionary depending on how much affection you have for the Power Glove.
🟢 Easy: Peter Pan reimaginings
Movies: Hook · Pan · Wendy · Peter Pan & Wendy
Hook asks the useful question Barrie never did: what if Peter Pan grew up, became a lawyer, and forgot how to have fun? Robin Williams plays adulthood like a clerical error while Dustin Hoffman treats piracy as repertory theater.
The other three pull the story in different directions. Pan builds an origin story, Wendy moves Neverland into a rougher natural world, and David Lowery's Peter Pan & Wendy returns to the familiar Disney shape with Jude Law taking over the hook. Peter keeps refusing adulthood. Filmmakers keep filing appeals.
🟡 Medium: Video-game competition drives the story
Movies: The Wizard · The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters · Free to Play · Gran Turismo
The King of Kong makes a Donkey Kong score dispute feel like national politics conducted inside an arcade. Free to Play scales that tension up to Valve's first International tournament, following three Dota 2 players whose livelihoods sit inside a bracket.
Gran Turismo bends the category by turning simulated racing into the audition for actual motorsport. The Wizard goes the other way and treats a console tournament as the finish line. In every case, mastery leaves the bedroom and demands witnesses.
🔵 Hard: Survival after an aviation disaster
Movies: Alive · Six Days Seven Nights · The Grey · Society of the Snow
Alive and Society of the Snow recount the same 1972 Andes disaster, but their emphases differ. J. A. Bayona's film gives the group a stronger collective voice and casts Uruguayan and Argentine performers close to the survivors' ages.
The Grey sends Liam Neeson into the Alaskan wilderness after a crash, while Six Days Seven Nights uses a forced landing to strand Harrison Ford and Anne Heche on a South Pacific island. One leans toward existential dread. The other remembers it booked a romantic comedy.
The crash is only the first problem. Shelter, distance, weather, hunger, and group decisions take over once the aircraft stops moving. Nobody gets to wait politely beside the baggage carousel.
🟣 Tricky: Intimate science fiction built around one big claim
Movies: Primer · The Man from Earth · Another Earth · Marjorie Prime
Primer makes time travel look like something two engineers might assemble after work and immediately misuse. Shane Carruth wrote, directed, scored, photographed, and starred in it, which helps explain why the film feels less designed than discovered under a workbench.
The Man from Earth barely leaves one house. Another Earth hangs a duplicate planet above a story about guilt, and Marjorie Prime puts an artificial recreation of the dead into a family living room. None needs a fleet of ships.
That is the click: remove the scale normally attached to science fiction and keep the impossible premise. What remains is people talking around the thing that has changed their lives. The special effect is often a pause before someone answers.
The small-room science fiction group lingered longest. For a game version of impossible movement and ambitious hardware, today's PixelLinkr puzzle has gliders, dragons, and a four-disc stack.