Tetris is probably the first computer game that many have encountered. Today’s kids on all those consoles whose names I don’t even know are playing games that visually look like feature films, and this math game created in the Soviet Union in the eighties was the main distraction for generations. And it was an interesting idea of the author of this biographical combination of thriller, comedy and drama about how this popular game found its way to audiences all over the world, but at the same time “Tetris” is a perfect example of everything that terribly annoys and bothers me in today’s American mainstream films.
It was done so sloppily and superficially that I felt terribly disappointed to see a great idea fall apart and be ruined. Such a flat and hollow script by Noah Pink, who was also directed in a completely uninspired, template way. It seems as if the otherwise solid Scottish filmmaker Jon S. Baird (Cass, Filth, Stan & Ollie) tried to copy the dynamic, fast and modern style of Guy Ritchie, Danny Boyle and even Martin Scorsese, but “Tetris” turned out to be at best “The Wolf of Wall Street” for the poor. It’s as if it was all done in a hurry, in the way soap operas are filmed today, right from the beginning, so all the characters, if we somewhat exclude the main character, the traveling salesman Hank Rogers, played by Taron Egerton, are so pointless, and the acting is disastrous .
And that’s a real shame because the story here is very interesting and takes us to the late eighties, a time when we could already smell the disintegration of the Soviet bloc. The game Tetris has already leaked out of the USSR after it was designed in his free time by Aleksej Pajitnov, a programmer from the state agency ELORG, which actually had a monopoly on importing and exporting hardware and software to the USSR. However, even though the game had already leaked to the West, the problem was in licensing and which Western company would get the rights to a game that everyone was convinced would be revolutionary and would bring wealth to whoever obtained the license.
The problem is that the license has to be obtained practically from the Soviet state, because regardless of the individual who designed the game, in the communist system there is no private property and it is considered a national asset. So Rogers will head to Moscow to get the rights to the game, but he won’t be the only one with that plan because some much stronger and richer players want the same. Unfortunately, everything that could and should have been good here is ruined by poor execution, and the characters are horribly irritating and made so clichéd and stereotypical that it almost hurts.