Monday, August 07, 2006
Timewarp Review: Tetris (2010)
Video game movies are never a good idea. Even the supposed good ones, like Silent Hill and Mortal Kombat, are really piles of shit when you actually subject them to basic cinematic rules like coherent plots and dimensional characters. Some may say that’s what we should expect for trying to adapt a video game, but I’m an optimist, and thankfully, that optimism has paid off with Brett Ratner’s Tetris.
Detective Aragones (Patrick Swayze, fresh from his role in the clunker Son of Dumber) is having a bad day. He’s on his fourth bottle of tequila, his wife has left him and his daughter is pregnant with triplets. But this doesn’t compare to what he has to fact downtown, when he is called to a grisly crime scene in a New York alley where a seemingly innocent pedestrian has been crushed by a steel girder, which itself was bent into an L-shape. The NYPD are baffled, as there appears to be no fingerprints on the girder, nor any clue to how it got from a construction site in Albany to the streets of Manhattan.
What’s worse for Aragones is that his uptight boss, Chief Drucker (Michael Ironside, Police Academy: 2019) has asked for an expert from the FBI’s X-Files-ish extraordinary crimes unit to come down and assist the detective. A broken man with a history of partners killed in action, his fears are justified when he finds out his new partner is Moxie (Charisma Carpenter, from Japanese horror hit The Sponge), the girl whose heart he broke when he left Tijiuana to join the NYPD. However, they have to put aside their differences for the sake of the case, which takes a stranger turn when another dead body is found in an adjacent spot in the alley, crushed by another girder, this time in the shape of a square. The fact that this bizarre murder is so similar to the last tells them that this has to be the work of a serial killer, thus Aragones and Moxie must both fight their personal demons while solving the puzzle, and catching this ruthless killer. The hunt is on…
I wasn’t really sure what to think going into Tetris. I mean, it’s a game about putting different-shaped blocks together. That’s not exactly Oscar-winning material, so I didn’t expect much. However, I am glad to say that I was completely wrong. Tetris is not just a good film, not just a great film, but a masterpiece of contemporary cinema. I used to hate Brett Ratner, and indeed ripped his flicks a new ass many a time, but here he reaches, well, not to be hyperbolic, but Kubrickian standards. The framing in this film is exquisite, and it never once gets boring, despite its five-hour running time.
The heart of this movie is Tetris, and Ratner’s approach to the source material. A lesser movie would have placed the movie in some sort of fantasy setting a-la Super Mario Bros, where the concept of stacking blocks up wouldn’t seem so far fetched. But what Ratner does brilliantly is sew the Tetris concept right into the fabric of reality. The idea of murdering people with girders bent into the same shapes as the Tetris blocks is a concept so brilliant, only a madman or a genius could come up with it.
But Ratner knows that concept alone will not make the film, so he comes up with the thoroughly memorable characters of Aragones and Moxie, two very well-realized characters in their own right who, while somewhat predictably, reconcile their relationship and create the key to solving the entire case. The fishing scene in particular is an amazing piece of subtle writing. While it’s not really that realistic to see someone fishing in the Hudson river, the clear machinations of the characters who are so clearly still in love, yet are also so irreconcilable – a theme demonstrated so carefully by Ratner’s placing of the tackle box and bait knife between the two – that it’s painful to watch.
Swayze and Carpenter give career performances as the two – sometimes it’s like watching Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey from the great Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, or better still, Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude. The sheer chemistry between these actors, together with Swayze’s amazing emotional range (check out the scene in his ex-wife’s cabana house – oh boy!), makes this relationship so satisfying that, by the end, you’re crying out for their reconciliation.
Warning: the next paragraph contains major spoilers!
But what really got me was the final solving of the Tetris puzzle. To see the actual movements on the screen of the line disappearing was a joy to behold, and the execution was superb. But the crux of the scene was the revelation – I mean, to find out that the ghost of Alexey Pazhitnov, the man who designed Tetris, was behind it all was a shock not felt since that fateful moment when we found out Gwyneth Paltrow’s head was in the box. And casting Ian McKellen as Pazhitnov was a stroke of genius. His generous and warm performance really cemented Pazhitnov as a tragic character of the ages that wouldn’t seem out of place in an opera by Verdi.
And that really helped the film’s climax, where along with the adrenaline felt from the action sequence of Swayze scaling the Empire State Building, we also felt tears of sadness and joy, as Pazhitnov’s ghost was laid to rest. It’s amazing how much sympathy you can feel for a man who crushed people with girders. And the twist with Shigeru Miyamoto as one of the victims, well I never saw that coming, even after they explained Pazhitnov’s anger at Miyamoto for exploiting his game. But it was utterly heartwarming to see them forget their differences in the end, with an ending that not only references Sunrise, The Wizard of Oz and Return of the Jedi, but also has a sly homage to the rediscovered cult classic Van Helsing.
There were some things that I found disappointing about the film. Ratner’s decision to record the score on a Bontempi keyboard was a poor one, and while I commend his faithfulness to the source material, I felt he should have gone with a contemporary score. Also, I think Ironside was too much of a cliché, and at sixty, a bit too old for some of his scenes, particularly the nightclub scene with the Joan Collins cameo.
But I can forget those gripes because the rest of the film is so wonderful. I never foresaw myself ever saying these words, but if Tetris is not in the running at the award ceremonies in the spring, I’ll be hugely disappointed.
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