“Pixels” started off lazily enough, with nothing more on its mind than ripping off “Ghostbusters” with video game characters. But it stumbled onto an accomplishment truly awe-inspiring: It makes “Battleship” and “The Watch” look good.

Hiding Adam Sandler’s participation on the poster of the film is understandable, but the studio should have taken the logical next step and made the entire film disappear, or at least have shot it off into space like the clips of 1982 pop-culture highlights which, in “Pixels,” are seen by aliens. They mistake images from classic arcade games as a military threat and respond by disguising themselves as Centipede and Pac-Man and attack the Earth. It’s sporting of them to offer us a best three-out-of five contest for galactic domination so that any record of the struggle would look a lot like a formula blockbuster with different wacky villains for each battle.

Sandler, whose team produced the film, plays an underachieving former teen video game champ whose equally dim best friend, played by Kevin James, grows up to be the president. Of a bowling league? No, of the United States. Between Kevin James and a meatball parmigiana for president, I’d say the sandwich is more plausible. And based on the actions of James’ President Cooper, the sandwich would make wiser decisions. The Prez is goofing around dumping sprinkles on a cake in the midst of alien attacks on Guam and the Taj Mahal. Couldn’t they make him, or the movie, dumb in an interesting way?

Though Sandler’s character, Brenner, grows up to be a loser who installs TVs for a living, he’s the first one the President calls when the space invaders arrive. A customer (Michelle Monaghan) Brenner was trying to flirt with turns out to be the president’s colonel in charge of superduper secret weapons, and Brenner’s other boyhood gamer pal, Ludlow (Josh Gad), joins the alien-repelling force along with Brenner’s archrival Eddie (Peter Dinklage).

Dinklage, for reasons best known to him, seems to be trying to sound like a black guy, but then again, this is the kind of anything-goes affair where a mad four-star officer (Brian Cox) appears to belong to a different branch of the military every time we see him — and the genius scientist instantly figures out how to defeat the aliens with what look like Super Soakers wrapped in tinfoil on the way to the set.

Do you sense that the movie is as adolescent as a zit? And yet I haven’t even told you about the hubba-hubba, see-the-pretty-lady slavering of the boys, the soundtrack’s cement-head rock (Loverboy, “We Will Rock You”) and dire one-liners like, “Have you been playing Space Invaders? You’re invading my space” or, “It’s totally tubular!” Mainly, the movie is a thin excuse to digitally wreck buildings as video game characters crumble into pixels. These bits look like little plastic cubes colored by glow sticks — and yet they’re the main special effect. You get the feeling the boys spent the nine-figure budget on trips to Hooters.

Sandler has found it vastly profitable to remain a mental middle-schooler into middle age, but, crucially, he’s stuck in a 1982 kid time capsule: His jokes are as fresh as the antique store. This movie isn’t for today’s teens, it’s for dudes born in the 1960s who never let go of their joysticks.