Josh Reviews Tetris

The film Tetris, available to watch on Apple TV+, tells the story of the efforts to market the video game Tetris for sale in the U.S. in the late eighties.  The film focuses on game designer Henk Rogers, who first learns of Tetris when he sees a demonstration at a CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas.  This starts Henk down a rabbit hole as he attempts to discover Tetris’ origins and to obtain the rights to distribute the game.  Turns out Tetris was created by Alexey Pajitnov in the U.S.S.R., for the government-controlled  organization called ELORG.  Henk connects with Nintendo, and together they dream of distributing Tetris as an early flagship game for their new handheld “gameboy” system, a game-changer in the video game industry.  But Henk soon find himself in over his head and navigating a web of intrigue, battling both wealthy U.S. capitalists as well as the byzantine and scary bureaucracy of the Soviet Union and the KGB.

I had no idea that Tetris was created in the Soviet Union!  This is a fascinating story, and the film Tetris tells it well. Writer Noah Pink and director Jon S. Baird have done a good job bringing this story to life.  This story of contracts and rights and clauses in contracts can get confusing, but the film does a solid job of keeping the story relatively clear for an audience to understand, and it zips along at enough of a clip that it doesn’t get boring.  The film does have a lot of characters and doesn’t avoid some complicated twists and turns in this story of who owns what rights where.  There were a few times when I wasn’t sure I understood everything, but I appreciated that the filmmakers didn’t dumb down the story too much, even as I’m sure they simplified a lot.

The only main off-notes in the film for me were some of the beats at the very end of the film, which involve a car chase and a race to the airport that had me rolling my eyes.  It’s an exciting ending, but perhaps too exciting — those sequences strike me as a Hollywoodization of the true story.

The film makes use of some fun old-fashioned video-game graphics in the opening titles, as well as in some framing and chapter headings during the film and in the action scene at the end.  I appreciated those clever touches!  (And I’m glad the film didn’t overdo them.)

Taron Egerton carries the film on his shoulders in the lead role of Henk Rogers.  I’ve enjoyed Mr. Egerton’s work in the Kingsman films as well as in the Elton John biopic Rocketman.  (All of those films were produced under Matthew Vaughan’s shingle Marv films.  I can see why they keep supporting Mr. Egerton’s work — he’s great! — but I hope for Mr. Egerton’s sake that he can also find good work elsewhere.)  Mr. Egerton brings an energy and enthusiasm to his performance that is infectious — I believed Henk’s enthusiasm for Tetris, and so I was rooting for him to succeed (even though Henk is basically just a salesman looking to sell Tetris and profit from it.  In this way, Tetris reminds me of the recent film Air, which was about the people behind the creation and selling of the Air Jordan sneaker.  Both Tetris and Air Jordans were culture-defining products; both movies telling the story of the creation of those products are interesting!)

Toby Jones (Capote, Captain America: The First Avenger, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) is wonderful as Robert Stein, who operates as a go-between between the Soviet authorities and the wealthy American Robert Maxwell.  Most of the other members of the film’s ensemble were new to me, but everyone’s work was solid.  Roger Allam (V for Vendetta), sounding a heck of a lot like John Rhys-Davies, plays the villainous millionaire Robert Maxwell, and Anthony Boyle (who originated the role of Scorpius Malfoy in the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) is wonderfully sniveling as his spoiled son, Kevin Maxwell.  Nikita Yefremov delivers quiet, understated work as Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov; Sofia Lebedeva brings a nice energy to the role of Sasha, who gets roped into being Henk’s Russian interpreter; Oleg Shtefanko brings great nobility to the role of ELORG head Nikolai Belikov, who finds himself just as caught up on the terrifying wheels of the U.S.S.R. system as do Alexey and Henk; Igor Grabuzov has a great villainous face as the greedy Russian politician Valentin Trifonov; Ayane Nagabuchi is great as Akemi Rogers, Henk’s wife; and Rick Yune (who played the villainous Zao in the Bond film Die Another Day) is fun to see in a small role as bank manager Eddie.

This film isn’t going to set the world on fire, but it’s an interesting story that is well told.  I’m glad to have seen it.

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