Tetris

Tetris
Starring Taron Egerton, Nikita Efremov, Sofia Lebedeva, Anthony Boyle
Directed by Jon S. Baird

It's interesting to find out the behind-the-scenes events that leads to something revolutionary, even if it's just a little 8-bit game about stacking blocks in order to eliminate them and prevent them from filling the screen. Tetris was a revolutionary game for Nintendo back in the 80s, and is currently one of the mos sold games in video game history, and the story behind it is quite a fascinating one - but being Hollywood, "Tetris" itself isn't the entirely true story but a slightly fabricated one to elicit excitement, to which the founders of the game attested to (such as no actual car chases). Still, "Tetris" tries to turn into "The Social Network" by telling its story, and in doing so gets themselves stuck in repetitive dialogue and set pieces that make you feel like you're stuck in a continual loop.

In 1988, Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) stumbles across a game made in Russia called Tetris and falls in love with it, wanting to obtain worldwide licensing rights. When he hears that Nintendo is marketing a new handheld console, he wants to make Tetris the game it's bundled with, and heads to Russia to meet with the game's designer, Alexy Pajitnov (Nikita Efremoy), but learns that another company wants the rights to the game - and the KGB wants nothing more than to silence him and prevent him from taking their beloved game and the income it could provide.

You'd never think a game about blocks could be an international incident, but that's what Tetris did. It pitted the traditional Communism versus Capitalism debate and shows during the Cold War how ruthless the USSR could be by their intimidation tactics against Rogers. It's not something we see in America, because entrepreneurship is praised and respected here, but in the USSR it was all government-run institutions where originality and especially Capitalism was seen as something to be crushed. The story is an interesting one, and I'm sure there was an interesting story to be told, but the majority of the film is spent in a bleak Russian boardroom where they discuss licensing rights and laws, to the point where I found myself distracted by Tetris on my phone before looking back up at the screen and see that they're still in the room - before rewinding and realizing they went somewhere else before ending up back there again.

The dialogue is stiffened and repeats itself, and if you played a drinking game every time you heard the word "Tetris" or "licensing," you'd be in the hospital for acute alcohol poisoning one-third of the way through. The characters are stereotypes - from Taron Egerton's mustache-wearing, never-take-no-for-an-answer smarmy salesman Henk Rogers to Nikita Efremov's rebellious Alexey to the generic KGB agents and game executives, everyone is like their own Tetris pieces in the film that refuse to turn, resulting in the screen filling up with tedious dialogue.

There were some decent aspects of the film, such as the use of 8-bit visuals thrown in to add excitement to the film, and the final act is rather enjoyable, but those don't make up for the drudgery you have to go through to get there. Films like this - ones filled with international espionage without the actual espionage - are hard to tackle if you're not in the mood for it, and maybe I'm being too harsh on it because I might not had been in the mood for it, but for me, "Tetris" was a movie stuck in its own history, running around in the same circle over and over again.

The Score: C