Tetris is an Apple TV original starring Taron Egerton as Henk Rogers and Nikita Yefremov as Alexey Pajitnov, about the true story of the invention and distribution of the world’s most famous game, Tetris. Funny enough, this is the second movie that has come out in the past month about an older, insanely popular game (Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game). That one was a lighthearted, charming retelling of that story. Tetris is not that. Tetris is told as a Cold War thriller as multiple countries and companies compete to buy licensing rights from Russia and the Soviet Union. Honestly, it really worked for me.
The tone of the movie is quite unique. Going into the viewing, I was expecting a goofy little movie about Egerton creating the game and generating its popularity. Tetris feels more like a political thriller, communism vs capitalism with the game being the straw that stirs the drink. The movie starts with a lighter tone as Henk Rogers is traveling around the world trying to purchase the rights to Tetris, but it soon dives into its true tone. The film takes place in 1988, as the Soviet Union was nearing its collapse, using the political climate as a motivator for the players of the standoff. The film makes it clear that the motivations for selling Tetris are rooted in politics. The meat of the story is within the negotiation scenes, as the Russians are working on deals with three separate parties, keeping all of them in the dark as to what is really happening behind the scenes. These scenes rarely had any physical action yet I was tensed up trying to see how they would play out. I appreciate that this movie didn’t try to make a comedy out of the subject matter. I feel like a lot of biopics about games are told through a lighter lens, but it would not have worked with Rogers and Yefremov’s story.
The performances were all around quite good. Taron Egerton is such an easy lead to get invested in. He is great at emoting without having to say how he’s feeling. Whether it was the salesman’s confidence or the pent-up frustration from being played, I could feel how he felt. He plays off the Russian actors well, as he has to work around the language barrier to get his deal done. Roger Allam and Anthony Boyle as Robert and Kevin Maxwell are perfectly snobby antagonists that you can easily root against. Toby Jones’s Robert Stein is played as a pawn, even though he was legitimately one of the first people to discover Tetris before it blew up. Nikita Yefremov’s Alexey is who gets this whole story kicked off. He is the man who coded the game and you can feel his frustration being dragged into this mess after being taken advantage of by both Stein and the Russians.
While I did like this movie, there are a couple of things that dropped it for me. First, the plot can get very confusing. There is so much movement with the licensing rights that it gets hard to follow. Rogers and Mirrorsoft have rights to different points of distribution (computer, arcade, handheld, etc.) for different countries and they are all trying to gain all the rights. It just gets hard to follow along until everyone goes to Russia to negotiate for the main rights. There were a lot of double crossings and deals falling through and I was quite confused about who owned what and where.
One of the other things was the animations. Tetris used pixelated animations to transition scenes or enhance visuals in the style of 8-bit games. At first, I liked how they looked and how the movie was using them because they matched the tone. However, once the movie became more serious and tense, the animations were still being used and didn’t match the tones of the scenes. We’d see Henk getting attacked and his family threatened and the next scene would be transitioned with a pixelated hotel, or there would be a car chase scene with the crashes animated. It took me out of an otherwise grounded movie.
Final Thoughts
This was a movie that I went into completely blind, and I was very pleased. The story is very engaging and it is well-acted. While it had its flaws, it was a really well-put-together film that flew under radars, thanks to bringing an Apple TV exclusive. If you subscribe to Apple TV or can access it elsewhere, I recommend giving this film a watch.
