As a wise meme once said, Tetris is the ultimate game to teach you about life, it’s a series of constant unending challenges where your success vanish, your failures accumulate and it’s all going to end in tears.
The story behind Tetris is also fascinating, I mean, it’s a game made in the USSR, in the dying days of the Cold War that somehow took over the world and is still arguably one of the most popular, high selling, influential games of all time.
You know what it probably didn’t need? A car chase. And a Russian henchvillain who I’m convinced wondered in off the set of a bad kids movie from fifteen years ago. He’s even got the evil billionaire with an idiot son backing him. It didn’t need a few other bits and bobs as well, but this is a film, not a documentary (Check out The Gaming Historian’s The Story Of Tetris on YouTube. An hour long historically accurate documentary of the story of Tetris) Or a book (I recommend The Tetris Effect by Dan Ackerman, My scriptwriter recommends Taken by the Tetris blocks: An Erotic Short Story by Leonard Delaney – He’s currently very, very single.)
Back on topic, we find that this is very much a film that you can tell where planet Earth and planet Hollywood collided. You can also tell that this film did not have enough budget for the amount of budget that was provided which makes sense. A film about a bunch of middle aged people having meetings does not need a ton of CGI. Because if the writing is strong enough, that can stand on it’s own. Look at something like one of my favorite films of all time, Bridge of Spies which deals with similar topics i.e. trying to get something out of the USSR whilst ensuring that you don’t get trapped in there.
That film didn’t need a car chase. Or a cartoon evil billionaire and his devious Russian Henchman and idiot son.
But I can sort of see why. After all, the MCU generation tends to get bored if something doesn’t explode every 15 seconds and what kind of person would enjoy a film where someone risks their house and marriage to secure the rights to a video game from a crumbling totalitarian regime whilst a scheming billionaire tries to do the same. Not to mention the standard issue KGB honeytraps and corporations all wanting their piece of the pie.
Nope, nothing interesting there at all.
I mean this film isn’t boring, I liked the little 8 bit style graphics that popped up on screen to illustrate something and Taron Egerton is always good fun, but I was watching this thinking that maybe it would have worked better as a short series? Certain scenes felt very rushed and I think that the extra time dealt given by a mini-series would allow for depth and tension and character development.
It would also have allowed certain threats to develop naturally as the aforementioned honeytrap is a character that the film doesn’t quite seem to know how to use so she just does whatever the film needs her to do in order to move the plot along.
At the end of the day, Tetris isn’t as good as it should be but it’s still fun to watch, I think that it just needed to pick a lane. Did it want to be a sort of serious film about a man trying to get a contract to sell some videogames or did it want to be a wacky comedy about a man trying to get a contract signed whilst fighting off wacky villains whilst trying to get someone to sign off on his contract. Either way would have worked, in the middle?
Not so much.
My Score- If Nothing Else
danielsdunkings 