‘Tetris’ has been released on Apple TV+, a movie based on a true story about the popular and highly addictive Russian video game from the 1980s, which features Taron Egerton as real life salesman Henk Rogers to narrate his association with the creator of the invention Alexey Pajitnov and how they managed to license it abroad while the fall of the USSR took place, almost narrated with an international intrigue similar to ‘Argo’ that this feature film seems to copy especially during a crucial sequence of the third act.
funny because coincides in time with the premiere of the new film by Ben Affleck, which also tells an ’80s business story about how Air Jordan shoes were created, and in which, in addition to an Americanist perspective, which seems to rescue the celebration of money from the Reagan-era yuppie stage, there is a dramatic core consisting of offers, counteroffers and an auction where the other candidates are bad and very bad. Both films seem to be the consequence of a whole moment in American cinema that has been leading to this.
Capitalist cinema is not destroyed, it is only transformed
Since ‘The Social Network’ (The Social Network, 2010), in which the history of Facebook contained a story of betrayal, in the last decade fictional stories of mediocre Americans willing to do anything in exchange for success have been common. A Mephistotelian pact treated with a breath of personal feat which includes characters such as ‘Nightcrawler’ (2015), in which success was linked to a lack of scruples, which later led to cross-sectional views of those to blame for the crisis with ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ ( The Wolf of Wall Street, 2013), updating the concept in times of appalling neoliberalism.
The new mafia is in the offices, plays with bills and takes advantage of the trust of the one next to it and Scorsese’s was followed by ‘Gold: the great scam’ (Gold, 2016) ‘Barry Seal: the dealer’ and ‘The founder’ (The Founder, 2016), which directly eliminated the act of decadence to break the morality of the fable, leading the process to a known and present product. Maybe in the movie with Michael Keaton he was the germ of the strange fashion of celebrating recent brands and products that comes in a torrent with projects like ‘Pinball’, ‘Blackberry’ and ‘Air’, a tendency to mythologize commercial licenses that tells us about recent history.
The founder
It may be another different expression of the same wave of neoliberal cinema, in which it seems that the most interesting thing is the ins and outs and negotiations rather than “the wonderful untold story” of the products. On the one hand people’s interest in commercial cinema is rescued with nostalgia and mythomania of objects for sale, as if history had stopped and now what humanity is really interested in are the success stories of past entrepreneurs who became rich. The best example is the fun and witty ‘Air’, which works as a great capitalist corporate marketing video to the core. Just be rich.
A “70s political thriller” without much tension
All these films take the classic structure of breaking the mold to a business achievement that would be an anecdote if it were not linked to a well-known logo. The result is cinema to motivate ADE students, and in whose final cartouches they tell you all the money that those involved won. The funny thing is that ‘Air’ itself tries to romanticize that great secret that it is explaining to you, while revealing that all the figures are because of the great economic apparatus behind it, recounting Nike’s ideological decalogue to tell you again how they only succeed those who bet and play it.
Although the story behind ‘Tetris’ is much more interesting, it is still an expression of the same anecdotal cinema, but the personality of the game allows you to apply a lot of bright colors and play with the eight-bit style, with animated moments that are coated in a nostalgia not very different from that of the reviled ‘Pixels’ (2015), which came to do the same with original video games like pac-man or Space Invaders. But under the layer of color and synthetic music (great use of the soundtrack by Lorne Balfe and Guadalupe Barbara) is an unusual story.
Venture’s efforts to secure video game license rights in late 1980s Moscow give the appearance of an espionage thriller progressing through mounting political tension. However, comparisons with a cold war thriller are somewhat frivolous, especially when we see how a film that really tells a very similar story like ‘The English Spy’ (2020) was ignored, in which the tension is irrespirable and the result is not close to comedy. And it is that the dramatic aspect of ‘Tetris’ is not very credible.
Under the colors, many common places
Here at heart we have the same struggle to profit from characters, conveniently referred to in the film as players, vying for a lucrative prize. Under the facade of showing the oppression of communism and the corruption of its system, we only see a rat race to win a license for a game that will generate money guaranteed as the stylized approach becomes more and more redundant. Taron Egerton portrays Henk as the typical impetuous and unwavering American but at least, unlike the man in ‘Air’, he has something personal at stake.
Henk risks his family’s financial future through a miscalculation with other culprits, but there are consequences. However, the film falls into the most well-worn clichés, with a long-suffering wife and the inconceivable scene of the father not making it to his daughter’s school function. Is it really allowed to use the empty seat card in the girl’s play in 2023? It’s just one more sign of the unspun hodgepodge of political, personal, and narrative elements that the film plays with, which breaks down completely in its final part.
Coldly thought of, the role of the game creator makes no plot point beyond showing up, and the final skid of slapping executives at the end shifts to a childish tone that hints at a possible comedic approach that would surely have worked better from the start. principle. ‘Tetris’ is a stretched anecdote that doesn’t hurt, but appears at a time when the absurdity of the corporate celebration has arrived in a torrent, Now we will have to wait for the stories of the inventor of the iron, or the creator of lollipops.
In Espinof | Cinema and videogames: the technical and narrative tools that blur the gap between the two media