Utopia of eight-bit globalism – Weekend – Kommersant
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John S. Byrd’s film “Tetris” was released on AppleTV +, where the stars of British and Russian cinema meet in the frame: Taron Egerton, Toby Jones, Nikita Efremov, Sofia Lebedeva and others. The exciting story about the struggle for copyright for Tetris is imbued with humanistic pathos, which, 35 years after the events shown, no longer arouses such enthusiasm as we would like.
It seems that the movie “Tetris” was born from numerology. In 1984, which was immortalized by George Orwell, the geometric masterpiece was invented by Alexei Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov in the film). In 1988, following Western partners, the Japanese company Nintendo bought the rights to Tetris – after which the Berlin Wall collapsed, the Cold War became obsolete, and the world stepped into a happy free future.
Of course, “after which” does not mean “because of what”, and many more people participated in the race for copyright than were shown in the film, but to criticize “Tetris” for the fact that the local Gorbachev (Matthew Marsh) does not speak Russian well, and Moscow was filmed in Scotland, rather ridiculous. After all, the fact that the Soviet Sherlock Holmes actually lived in Riga is not considered a problem. It is much more productive to look at what is, and not at what could be (a rule that is also true for a socialist utopia). From this angle, the retrodrama of John S. Baird, who once directed The Filth based on the novel by Irvine Welsh, is the cyberpunk we deserve.
So, 1988. Entrepreneur and not-so-lucky game designer Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) sees something at a game show in Las Vegas that turns his life upside down. “Tetris” is simple as all ingenious and leaves no one indifferent. It was invented by a certain Alexei from the USSR, where there is no gaming industry, but an outstanding example of game design, imagine, was found. Rogers buys the rights to Tetris in Japan without leaving his monitor and even persuades the console giant Nintendo to use the Soviet hit as a pre-installed game for the upcoming innovation – the eight-bit GameBoy portable console.
There is a catch: the publisher Mirrorsoft, run by father and son Maxwell, is in no hurry to share the monopoly on Tetris, does not recognize the legality of the paper signed in Vegas, and even out of harm enters into a contract with Nintendo’s rivals Atari. True, the invisible hand of the market has not yet reached the “pocket” consoles – and Rogers, who has put on a stake in the Tokyo apartment where he lives with his wife and two daughters, rushes to Moscow to visit the dungeons of the mysterious state corporation Elorg (“Electronorgtekhnika”). And there he finds out that the USSR has not yet seen any payments under the contract and is ready to clash with the capitalists on their own field of legal subtleties.
The gray Orwellian metropolis, in whose depths the ingenious game was developed, perfectly fits the cyberpunk formula “high tech, low life” (“high technology, low standard of living”). The only difference is that this is sci-fi without a single fantastic assumption. Although director Baird and screenwriter Noah Pink are struggling to present the pursuit of copyright in a fast-paced arcade format. Introduction to key characters is designed as a character selection screen. The new location is announced with a side view panorama, known to anyone who has ever launched Mario or another platform game. Views of Moscow are periodically covered with pixels (the find is not very expressive, but still).
The gamification of reality unties the hands of Tetris: perhaps for Rogers, imbued with Pajitnov’s invention, all this is like an exciting quest. A test with expressive mini-bosses like the head of Elorg Belikov (Oleg Stefanko), the KGBist from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Trifonov (Igor Grabuzov) and the translator Sasha (Sofya Lebedeva), who is not who she seems. Their stereotype here is balanced by the caricatured capitalist Maxwells: the elder, played by Roger Allam, seemed to have stepped off a satirical anti-bourgeois poster. This allows you to put an equal footing between the big shots on both sides of the Iron Curtain, which are opposed by the sly but honest entrepreneur Rogers and the son of the enemy of the people, Pajitnov, an idealist whose invention allowed people around the world to overcome the hardships of an increased level of complexity without getting up from their chair. Unless, of course, we are talking about the version for slot machines.
The problem with Tetris is not that Baird and Pink are exporting a Soviet dystopia: after all, the international version of the game was published with a pixelated Red Square as a backdrop and an eight-bit soundtrack, which included, for example, Kalinka-Malinka and Peddlers “. In 2023, the film is even able to appease with the fact that citizens and the state are clearly separated here, and the main line is that everyone who loves jeans, freedom and The Final Countdown will easily find a common language with a person from any corner of the world. . No wonder Rogers rushes between the USA, Great Britain, the USSR and Japan, “advertising” the creeping globalization, to which all empires – former and current – are submissive.
And yet, 35 years later, ordinary populism does not allow you to enjoy charismatic artists (Edgerton in a mustache is especially good, although Efremov and Grabuzov are not far behind in the roles of a “good Russian” and a cynical KGBist). “Global peace” turned out to be another utopia, convenient for corporations to move funds, and the Soviet project in a number of former republics simply reflashed itself with market opportunities. Speaking without equivocations, Tetris clearly demonstrates how the idea differs from the implementation: behind the beautiful fall of the figures and the disappearance of boundaries – the key image of the film – there is an extensive and not the simplest code. Having bought it, you do not buy freedom and a happy future.
Look: AppleTV+
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