Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Oct 2, 2023 10:37:28 GMT -5
Tetris(8/1/2023)  Tetris is one of a wave of movies that seem to have come out this year telling the “untold true story” of how some company or product made it to market, this one trying to explain how the famous computer game Tetris found its way from a Soviet government programmer to Game Boys all over the world. To do this it focuses in on a guy named Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) who is on the hunt for the rights to the game and winds up in the Soviet Union trying to outbid two other Western game developers as well as a crooked KGB agent trying to get a bribe out of the situation. I’ve heard people compare this to The Social Network but the movie it has a lot more in common with is Argo: clever guy in a hostile country trying to pull off a complicated deal with high stakes. In broad strokes this is based on a real story but there are pretty big creative liberties taken (including the addition of a car chase) which are not terribly plausible. On top of that the movie feels obligated to keep the audience’s attention by adding a bunch of goofy flourishes in which elements of the screen are made to mirror 8-bit game graphics which just feels kind of tacky. In fact the movie just generally feels like it’s trying way too hard to make potentially dry subject matter seem fun and it king of cheapens the overall project. The movie is a fun enough watch as it is but it’s not a movie that really aspires to be something more than that and its destination as a streaming exclusive kind of fits. **1/2 out of Five |
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PhantomKnight
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Join Date: Jun 2005
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Post by PhantomKnight on Oct 2, 2023 11:02:49 GMT -5
It's interesting that both Tetris and Air came out around the same time, as both films detail the business side of the creation of two highly popular products. Air managed to take its story and make it accessibly human, Tetris...is fine, but maybe not as exciting or engaging as it thinks it is. A lot of the main crux of this story deals with copyright law over the game of Tetris and the legal battle for the rights to the game and despite the movie's best efforts, the material never quite comes alive the way the filmmakers want it to. There's no shortage of flashy camera movements and editing techniques on display here, but those can only do so much to make the central story interesting. To be fair, the movie is never boring -- the performances and the direction both still do manage to bring a welcome energy to the proceedings -- but either before or by the halfway mark, I realized that this wasn't really grabbing me the same way that something like Air did. I don't know, maybe there's only so much you can do to make a movie about copyright law interesting, or maybe you need a writer like an Aaron Sorkin to come in and punch up the dialogue or something. But I think the main thing here is that the film just never really got me to fully care. It makes some attempts by way of getting into Taron Egerton's character's family life, but that's pretty run of the mill "workaholic father" stuff that plays out in fairly typical fashion. Tetris certainly has high ambitions on a filmmaking level, and it's able to execute everything to a modest success level, but it ultimately didn't quite connect for me personally to the level required to take it from a moderate success to a win.
**1/2 /****
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