Tetris Review

Curious. Watching Tetris you realize that at the end of the the eighties the world as we knew it was destined to change forever, with the collapse of communism, but also that in the end the world as we knew it, especially on this side of the iron curtain, was already more or less like today.
Why Tetris it’s a film that does many things together, and does it in a playful spirit (it couldn’t have been otherwise), and with little fear of crossing genres and registers, and perhaps seeming schizophrenic.
Obviously the main thing that Tetris does is to tell, in a more or less fictional key, how that game invented there by Aleksej Leonidovič Pažitnov became the craze of millions of players all over the world, distributed as a bundle with the first, legendary Game Boy by Nintendo. Because to get to that commercialization there, a Dutch gentleman by birth, a New Yorker by adoption and resident in Tokyo after stopping in Honolulu named Henk Rogerssomeone who programmed and sold videogames by trade, had to face a real odyssey, very risky, and come to terms with the greed and corruption of both sides: those of Western capitalism, and those of the Soviet regime.

Just to give you an idea, Rogers (who in the film has the face of Egerton Conferenceflanked in the cast by well-known and valid people such as Toby Jones and less known but no less valid as Nikita Yefremov, Igor Grabuzov and Sofya Lebedeva) had to contend with people like the media mogul Robert Maxwell (That of the Daily Mirror, so to speak) and his son Kevin, with an obscure video game dealer named Robert Stein, with bureaucrats at the head of Soviet state bodies, ruthless men of the Politburo e KGB agentscrossing tangentially even from the figure of Mikhail Gorbachev (which by the way comes out very well from the film).
And again to give you an idea, the one that starts as a legal battle based on contractual quibbles and more or less explicit fraud relating to the transfer of the rights to the game to Western companies that are contending for it, such as a kind of financial thriller, it becomes a story of espionage and politics in which echoes almost like Le Carré alternate with moments of comedyall linked to the unconscious enthusiasm of the cowboy Rogers, and others like a real action movie tempered by ironic 8-bit inserts.

Written by Noah Pink (who was the creator of the tv series Geniusthat up Albert Einstein con Geoffrey Rush) and directed by Jon S. Baird del biopic Laurel & Hardy, Tetris starts from premises – the reconstruction of the origins of an extraordinary success, and the portrait of who is behind it – which can be considered in some way analogous to a film like The Social Network: which is also very different, and not only because Pink is not Sorkin and Baird is not Fincher.
It’s very different because here was the intention to work on a true story making it a simple cinematic entertainmentwith all that this entails in terms of simplification, spectacularization, betrayal and reworking.
Tetris it is first of all a movie with a pop flavor, and not just for the music or 8-bit graphics that punctuate the narrative, and not even just for telling a game that is part of pop history. it is for precise desire for lightnessma without this lightness ever penalizing the spy thriller aspects of the story. And also managing to make an effective and, in his own way, ruthless portrait of life in the times of real socialism, of the Soviet Union on the eve of its definitive crisis, but also of an already sick capitalism, which corrupts and becomes corrupted.

The portrait of the eighties is never too nostalgic: songs in their own way legendary like “The Final Countdown” e “Holding Out For A Hero” are used rationally, in the corridors of the editorial staff Mirror you can see a cover (perhaps anachronistic?) with Claudia Shiffer.
The result, after a couple of hours of sincere fun, is (also) to open a new browser tab, type www.tetris.comand play as long as there is charge in the laptop.