Rating: 8.2
Overall, a very entertaining movie that is a well constructed fun watch to see how Tetris escaped the Soviet Union as the tone coupled with performances help bring the audience on a fun ride, though the movie is a bit too safe in its writing and storytelling.
Good Direction (Really helps set the tone and of the movie through a more lighthearted approach to storytelling; he gets a good amount out of his actors; the movie does feel very safe and nothing extraordinary in terms of its direction), Pretty Good Acting (Very Good from Taron Egerton (Does a good job in commanding the lead in the movie and showing a range of emotion throughout, the source material really limits him from going above and beyond like his other roles though), Pretty Good from Toby Jones, Pretty Good to Good from Nikita Yefremov (A bit more of a reserved performance so there is not too much to work from (not entirely his fault as that was how the character was written), but he does do a good job playing off of Egerton throughout the movie), Pretty Good from the rest of the cast), Very Good Story (The overall story is well laid out, though it is a bit overt in its storytelling, and the story elements build off of each other to create suspense for the climax), Pretty Good to Good Screenplay (A bit simplistic in the dialogue but flows well throughout; not too much symbolism because its a biopic; the humor throughout the movie was decent and helped make the film pretty lighthearted; no real foreshadowing), Good to Very Good Score (Really enjoyed how they interpolated the Tetris theme into it and used the score throughout to build suspense), Good to Very Good Cinematography (Helps with placing emphasis on different subjects and was overall very professional throughout), Good Sound (Enjoyed how it replaced sounds with 8-bit sounds to make the movie feel more like a video game from the 80s), Decent Editing (Really helped give that video game feel to the movie; the transitions between countries felt a bit amateurish though; There were also these weird freezes throughout the movie (do not know if this was intentional or if it was just from it being a world premiere and the is not fully polished yet)), Very Good Visual Effects (Gave the movie a more 80s, NES feel when it was used in conjunction with scenes; the 8-bit animations replacing shots were pretty good but felt a bit amateur (though overall I did enjoy them)), Plot Structure was pretty standard as it followed the standard arc (with the all parts of the plot being evident), Pacing was pretty steady with no major issues (no need to add or cut anything), Climax was executed well as it was a fun rush filled with action in a movie that does not have any (though it helps suspend the disbelief if this actually happened in real life), Tone was very tech as well as 80s and I felt the movie did a really good job at establishing tone; the movie did a really good job at making it a programming/CS movie as they spoke about concepts very well throughout the movie, Watched World Premiere at SXSW.
