I have actual things to be doing right now. Instead, I did this:
TETRIS: THE FIRST BLOCKS
Chris Pratt is just your average, snarky, beer-loving, football-watching, American retired sniper who’s struggling to put his life back together after his loving wife (who we’ll briefly glimpse in a floral dress and long, wavy hair) died in childbirth. Thankfully, aliens attack, planning to wipe out all of humanity by sending wave after wave of strangely shaped gigantic structures to the earth’s surface, obliterating everyone and everything when they land on the ground. Humanity is literally on the run, trying to outrace and outfly these interlocking, colorful instruments of smushing doom. It’s up to Chris Pratt to save the world, with the help of . . .
A) Common – our hero’s funny black best friend. He’s a family man, but we won’t see much of his family, or any of his actual life. His role here is to make jokes, and help our hero with his emotional problems.
B) Brad Dourif – an old, eccentric scientist who everyone shunned when he predicted this exact threat five years ago. His hair, befittingly, will be mad scientist levels of crazy huge.
C) Will Yun Lee – a stoic Asian man who will somehow use martial arts against falling alien blocks. He won’t have much dialogue, but when he does open his mouth, it will be to say something profound. He will get one deadpan joke, though, near the end.
D) Alexandra Daddario- the scientist’s attractive daughter, a tireless and leggy crusader of justice who will do exactly one semi-badass thing before needing rescue three separate times during the film. She’ll wear glasses for the first 20 minutes or so. Then, about the time she literally lets her hair down, she won’t need them anymore.
At the end of the film, Chris Pratt will have to manually detonate the explosives he set on the mothership, causing all the blocks in the sky and on the ground to spontaneously melt. This should drown everyone, of course, but instead the world will just experience very colorful rain for a few days. Everyone thinks Chris Pratt is dead, but miraculously he escapes, and he and Alexandra Daddario kiss amidst the the liquid destruction.
TETRIS 2 – BLOCKS: THE COMEUPPANCE
Two years after the events of The First Blocks, the aliens have come back, and they mean business this time! The blocks are even bigger and fall twice as fast. The team will have to band back together . . . except for Alexandra Daddario, unfortunately, whose character was killed in a car accident offscreen sometime in the past two years. Chris Pratt is sad about it, of course, but luckily Megan Fox is around to replace her. She’s a badass action girl who doesn’t play by the rules and doesn’t have time for men . . . but Chris Pratt breaks through her icy exterior, finding out that she, too, once lost someone. They can heal together. It will be beautiful.
The good guys are able to stop a well-meaning but totally dickish general (Clancy Brown) from implementing a battle strategy that would get all of humanity killed. They’re able to fend off the aliens . . . but oh noes! Brad Douriff, who in the past two years has become like a father to Chris Pratt, is killed! (He’s going to see his daughter in Heaven, though, so you know. It could be worse.) And The Evil Alien Emperor Who Was Never Mentioned In the Last Movie (Willem Dafoe) has taken a liking to Megan Fox and abducts her before their spaceship jumps to warp speed and flies away. Cliffhanger!
TETRIS 3: BLOCKS . . . IN SPACE!
Chris Pratt, Common, Will Yun Lee, Clancy Brown, and newcomer Alfie Allen have a plan: build a spaceship from the one Tetris block that conveniently didn’t melt the last go-around, fly back to the aliens’ homeworld, and destroy it, saving Megan Fox in the process. Alfie Allen is an arrogant, whiny scientist who nobody likes, but they need him to make the spaceship work. It’s not until they’re actually in space that the truth comes out: he’s also the drunk driver that killed Alexandra Daddario!
Tensions are obviously high (Common stops Chris Pratt from killing Alfie, because he’s a good guy like that), but the team manages to reluctantly work together. They discover that their ship can generate more giant blocks, which they use to cascade against the aliens’ home world in specific patterns, ultimately destroying it in a classic display of Hollywood irony. Clancy Brown dies valiantly in battle, while Alfie Allen makes the big sacrifice play, asking for forgiveness which is finally granted. Chris Pratt saves Megan Fox (who gets to punch Willem Dafoe once, before Pratt kills him, of course), and the rest of the team flies home to live happily ever after!
I’m smelling multiple Oscar winners here. Care to make your own trilogy outline? I’d love to hear it.