Epic Tetris

“It’s a very big, epic sci-fi movie,” says Larry Kasanoff of Threshold Entertainment. He’s talking about a movie based on Tetris, the game of falling geometric shapes.

The movie is going to be much, much more than geometry. We’re going to learn that “‘Tetris’ is the teeny tip of an iceberg that has intergalactic significance.” 

The most revealing thing in the little WSJ piece on the movie, though, is Kasanoff’s claim that “Brands are the new stars of Hollywood.”

One admires the ingenuity. It’s a triumph of imagination to turn rectangles or interlocking blocks into epic drama. But it’s impossible to avoid the nagging sense that it is also, perhaps more, a failure of imagination: Why can’t stars still be the stars of Hollywood? What about people? Isn’t this a cave-in to the hyper-modern ethos that turns every industry into a subsidiary of advertising?

Kasanoff mistaken. Brands can’t carry a movie. The Lego Movie was a clever, diverting, overly stimulating piece of fluff. Insofar as it was something more, it wasn’t because of the brand but because of the film’s brilliant capture of the random order of childhood play. 

Kids didn’t want to enjoy the film because it had Legos. They liked what the Legos did, what they said. They responded to character and plot and all the traditional features of drama.

It’s being reported that Hollywood is scared by falling profits. New technologies are blamed, but perhaps Hollywood should engage in some old-fashioned introspection. Film-viewers seem to be still Aristotelians at heard. And some people might just prefer to drink their advertising straight.