Director: Jon S. Baird
Cast: Taron Egerton, Nikita Yefremov, Sofia Lebedeva, Anthony Boyle
Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Been on the list to watch for a minute.
Did I Like It: The gold standard of any adaptation is does it make you want to continue the good feelings that the film engenders by going back to the source material.
Now, this isn’t really an adaptation of the game literally every person on planet earth both communist and capitalist has spent at least a little bit playing since 1989. How could one do that? Although, it’s not entirely departed from the puzzle game, as there is certainly a vibe in the films concluding car chase that urged me to play several rounds of the game after everything was done.
Now, the real strength of the film lies outside of those sequences. Indeed, any scenes trying to reach for special effects and production values take me out of the proceedings. Much of the climax, taking place during a massive Soviet parade has all the verisimilitude of an endless series of geometric shapes built out of four squares falling down from the ether.
And that’s a real shame, because the film has a real energy to it. Not the dour drudgery of The Social Network (2010), but a delightful, heist movie, borderline buddy cop energy that has easily been one of the more enjoyable movies I have taken in this year. Does it have anything to do with what actually happened between Henk Rogers (Egerton) and Alexey Pajitnov (Yefremov) and the road from Tetris being a Soviet home brew game to the ubiquitous puzzler of the 90s.
I might spend a little more time delving into the rest of the movie, but the reality is this review has been difficult to write. I keep stopping to play another round of Tetris.