Tetris – A Ridiculously Intense Political Thriller (Early Review)

Everybody knows the phenomenon known as Tetris, the addictive puzzle game involving a set of falling bricks. Standing the test of time and remade and reworked into countless iterations across countless platforms over the years, it continues to entertain the masses as the highest grossing video game of all time. The question of how that phenomenon came to be may not be one that many are asking but the aptly-named Tetris tells that story and it’s definitely a wild one that does take some leaps. This surprisingly intense Cold War political thriller is merely the backdrop to a simple story about a man trying to bring the game to the world and the hurdles he faced along the way. Not a film about history by any means, the setting is merely a means to an end with some embellishments to inflate its ridiculous nature. However, instead of playing things more straight, it frames the story as a video game with plenty of stylistic flourishes that work both for and against it. It’s basically fun 180s time capsule until it starts to undercut itself. Leading the way is Taron Egerton and his funny accent which is unfortunate though for what he lacks in accent, he makes up for in charm.

As mentioned, Tetris tells the story about how the titular game became a global sensation. The film follows Dutch video game designer and entrepreneur Henk Rogers (Egerton) who only needed a break and happened to stumble upon Tetris and was immediately wowed. Believing to have found his purpose, he made it his mission to bring the game to the world and to give his family a better life. As it wouldn’t have made much of a film otherwise, that process wasn’t necessarily a straightforward one. As much as Rogers believed in Tetris, convincing other was a challenge. Popular in the then Soviet Union, it had failed to find a foothold outside of the country due to the communist regime but it was the least of his concerns as getting the rights to the game on all platforms, including the newcomer Game Boy, also meant competing in legal battles against forces with deeper pockets. Seeing the same promise in the game as he did, they lacked the same vision and their intentions were perhaps not as pure. Bogged down at times by that legal drama, the film got more interesting once the story inevitably got to the Soviet Union where the characters found themselves consumed by the ongoing Cold War.

The stakes ratcheted up once the story moved to the Soviet Union as it was considered dangerous to enter the country for any reason during the late 1980s. Rogers believed so much in Tetris that he deemed it worth the risk. Unfazed by the current situation, he kept moving forward on a quest to secure a licensing deal for the rights to the game. However, the question of who truly owned the rights to Tetris was a complicated one. In between contentious boardroom negotiations, there was the cloud of the communist government looming over the proceedings. Keeping an eye on all the parties involved, they had their thumbs on the scale in order to advance the interests of the Soviet Union by any means necessary thus putting a target on Rogers and others. Out of that, a plethora of ruthless figures looking to assert their power over anyone or anything standing in the way of the Soviet Union and unlikely supporters emerged such as the inventor of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov (Efremov), was one of the many with targets on their backs. Over the course of the film, it became clear that those negotiations went hand in hand with the future of the Soviet Union as the game was a potential means for prosperity moving forward. That process appeared to be as contentious.

Despite all the ridiculous twists and turns, Tetris was still a blast. Glazing over the historical side of the story, the film is meant to entertain and for the most part, it is. Great production design and costumes put viewers in the late 1980s and the bleaker Cold War Russia. The look of the latter does get somewhat repetitive with a lot of grey but that’s a minor issue. The most notable aspect of the film is Egerton’s accent as Rogers. Though it does sound comical, his charm and energy make for a very rootable character for viewers to invest in. However, his accent does distract from emotional scenes and his lack of range fails to sell them as the film missed grounding the rest of the story around him. Meanwhile, the chemistry between Egerton and Efremov made for a fun dynamic that the film unfortunately didn’t tap into enough.

In the end, Tetris is a ridiculous true story thriller that delivers an entertaining watch in spite of that. Avoiding the usual pitfalls of video game films, this is a film about a game rather than a video game film though one that just tried hard to be both in ways that didn’t always work.

still courtesy of Apple

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.