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WHY THE TETRIS MOVIE IS THE STUPIDEST IDEA EVER - BY MR BIFFO

30/6/2016

16 Comments

 
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It can't have just been me who felt the fabric of reality tremble slightly upon the news that the proposed Tetris movie has now been expanded into a trilogy. It's the sort of askew Hollywood thinking that is beyond parody. Well... almost.

Here's how producer Larry Kasanoff broke it to Empire magazine: "The story we conceived is so big. This isn’t us splitting the last one of our eight movies in two to wring blood out of the stone. It’s just a big story. We want the story to be a surprise, but it’s a big science-fiction movie. 

"We’re not going to have blocks with feet running around the movie, but it’s great that people think so. It sets the bar rather low! I came up with the idea as I was thinking about Tetris and the theme of creating order out of chaos."


He concluded: "I guarantee you it’s not what you think.”

Kasanoff might be familiar to some of you as the producer of the Mortal Kombat: Conquest TV series, and as the director of straight-to-DVD animated epic Foodfight!...
KASANOVA
​Frankly, it doesn't matter how good an idea Larry Kasanoff has come up with. It still begs the question: why did he have to come up with it at all? What sort of misguided lunacy thinks a science fiction move based upon Tetris - an abstract puzzle game, with - at most - a vague Soviet aesthetic, is the way to go?

Doing a film about the creation of Tetris I get. Everyone's got a story, and I dare say you could eke out a three-act structure from the life of Alexey Pajitnov. He grew up in the USSR, then moved to the States when his game became an international hit.

Pajitnov was a scientist who loved puzzles. He never planned for Tetris to become the phenomenon it did, as "The First Game From Behind The Iron Curtain". It was just something he did for fun - and got left behind as his game became mired in one of the most complex legal battles ever fought in the history of the games industry.

Find the order out of chaos through-line in that.

I'm slightly annoyed with myself that I have an immediate gut reaction to the news of Tetris being a sci-fi trilogy - that I am, essentially, damning the movie before it even gets released, or made. But I suppose what irritates me is not the idea as such, but the thinking behind it. I just don't get it.

I mean, there are plenty of games - admittedly not all of them with the weight carried by the Tetris brand - which would make better movies. And why a sci-fi movie?! Why a trilogy? It just smacks of an executive using something wholly inappropriate to scratch an itch. Like somebody swatting at a flea bite with an original copy of the Magna Carta. 
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WHAT BUGS YOU, PLZ?
I think what really bugs me is not merely the sheer lunacy of thinking something like Tetris could be an epic trilogy, or the ill-considered thought that goes into planning it as a trilogy before the first one even comes out, or the attempt to inappropriately appropriate something so beloved for what feels like such a misguided end.

No. It's more the fact that it seems to demonstrate such wholly blinkered, narrow thinking.

Because Tetris is a video game, of course it has to be a sci-fi movie. Even though there was nothing about the game itself which suggested science-fiction.

It feels representative of how much those outside of gaming don't get it. How we are still, somehow, in our own walled-off paddock. Even though Tetris - out of all the games in the history of gaming - might have the biggest crossover potential. Even my mother played Tetris. Yet I'm pretty certain she's never watched a sci-fi movie in her life. It feels like it's dragging gaming - once again - back to that place it has always struggled to escape from, a place where it's viewed with suspicion by Them. The Not-Us-es.

​Tetris is, potentially, the least geeky game ever - and yet its big screen debut (if it gets made, that is - this is Hollywood we're talking about) is going to be treated in a geeky way. There's a brilliant, clever, inspiring, life-affirming Tetris movie to be made... but I'm pretty sure it's not a three-part sci-fi epic.

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FROM THE ARCHIVE:
EXCLUSIVE SCRIPT EXTRACT - TETRIS: THE MOVIE
​
EXCLUSIVE: FLAPPY BIRD: THE MOVIE SCRIPT EXTRACT
16 Comments
Wadaload
30/6/2016 12:01:02 pm

I hope they follow this up with a Ludo movie.

Also, I think the bar is quite low due to most (all?) other video game movies being a bit rubbish.

Reply
Bruce Flagpole
30/6/2016 01:36:24 pm

Tetris: the heartwarming, rags-to-riches tale of independent courier Jimmy Tetris...who discovered a unique talent for packing his deliveries so he could fit more in his van than any other driver.

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Pablo Watsoni
30/6/2016 02:07:13 pm

Now THAT'S a story worthy of a trilogy! I guess he'll have to be a cyborg or drive a flying van to fit in with the sci-fi theme.

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SH
1/7/2016 11:47:54 am

Hate to do this, but I literally LOL'ed at that

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colincidence link
1/7/2016 01:21:56 pm

The twist in the middle is when his packages start disappearing line-by-line.

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Dr Peanuts
30/6/2016 01:38:04 pm

My predictions of what the story will be:

Giant block shaped robots that start messing around in New York.

Solar flare causes gravity at a builders yard to reverse for a bit.

Guy called Christopher get tetanus.

Builder develops telekinetic powers.


And those are the good ideas!

Reply
Acid_Arrow
30/6/2016 03:43:28 pm

Tetris: A low-key arthouse movie charting the effects of the fall of the Soviet Union on a small village in rural Russia. A young protagonist who harbours dreams of leaving his surroundings, obsessively plays the game which provides an escape from his harsh existence. His behaviour leads to increasing conflict with his alcoholic father whose already unstable mood has been darkened even further by the fall of his beloved regime.

Adam Sandler to direct with Kevin James starring as the father.

Reply
Dr Kank
30/6/2016 05:10:52 pm

I bet it will be a Matrix ripoff.

Ted Reiss is an everyday banker who also lives a secret life as an infamous hacker called Tetris. One day he is redecorating his apartment when he discovers that under the wallpaper the walls are made up of irregularly shaped, brightly coloured blocks. A number of mysterious agents then burst into his apartment and threaten to rough him up. Luckily Tetris is rescued by a hot woman not called Trinity, who takes him to meet a secret cell of freedom fighters led by a black guy not called Morpheus. Tetris discovers that the world he knows is a lie, built out of alien blocks by an evil AI, and that it is his destiny to lead the human race in a desperate struggle for freedom.

Or it might be a Tron ripoff.

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Kelvin Green link
30/6/2016 08:45:13 pm

If you're going to make a film of a classic computer game with Soviet-inspired visuals, why not do Strider? That would be ace.

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Damon link
30/6/2016 08:45:16 pm

There is a Tetris song that actually has a story... It's silly but it works.

https://youtu.be/TwcS46tkixI

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timmypoos
30/6/2016 09:54:23 pm

I had similar doubts regarding a 3 part Hollywood adaptation of The Hobbit. It's shit being right.

p.s
Tetris is a game.

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AcidBeard
30/6/2016 10:27:25 pm

Yo momma is the worst idea ever.

Oh hang on what's that now? The tetris blocks aren't going to run around the movie with feet?! Then what the fuck are they going to run around on!!? Penii?!!!

I take it back. It is the worst idea ever.

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Spiney O'Sullivan
2/7/2016 04:34:48 pm

If anyone hasn't seen Kasanoff's magnum opus FoodFight!, do. It's a kids' animated film with an all-star cast that happens to based on the utterly shameful concept of combining junk food mascots into a movie intended to sell more sugary and calorific products directly to kids in a way that would send Jamie Oliver catatonic. Now, granted we all grew up on cartoons abusing our youthful naivety for profit, but at least you couldn't get diabetes from Transformers.

The film mercifully flopped due to a bizarre decade-long development hell in which computers containing key assets were supposedly stolen and the film was tossed around between investors before being unceremoniously excreted for public consumption in a cinema run that grossed $20,000. It also spawned without the lucrative promotional exercise it was intended to create, probably averting a global juvenile health crisis.

Visually it looks only marginally better than an episode of Reboot, and most of the original cast are awkwardly-animated grotesques. It also boasts awful directing, with an incredibly drawn-out third act battle scene, an awful plot and a deeply inconsistent world. Script-wise, it has no real sense of tone or subtlety, and is punctuated by a bunch of weirdly out-of-place racial and sexual humour that doesn't really belong in a PG-rated advert for products made mostly out of high-fructose corn syrup.

I'd call it The Room of animated kids' films, but The Room was a product of hope and delusion, not of callous cynicism and "synergistic" cross-promotional branding.

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Random Reviewer
3/7/2016 05:45:41 pm

Reminds me of UK:R Lummines fan fiction.

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Col. Asdasd
3/7/2016 10:48:57 pm

Although presumably a lot less sexually explicit.

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garmin etrex 30x link
25/3/2022 12:28:07 pm

Le Garmin eTrex 30 est un appareil GPS portable et alimenté par batterie

Reply



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