A combination of art and math, Tetris is 8-bit poetry in motion — or so goes the sales pitch offered up in director Jon S. Baird’s biopic about efforts to license the Russian video game for distribution and … are you still awake?
Hollywood loves a corporate origin story. Next month comes “Air,” the mash note to Nike delivered as a Ben Affleck and Matt Damon movie. In May, we’ll see the release of “BlackBerry.” But first on deck is Apple TV+ with “Tetris.”
Starring Taron Egerton (“Kingsman: The Secret Service”), the stylistic approach is upbeat, bordering on camp with all the requisite ‘80s signifiers on the soundtrack. It’s a story (from screenwriter Noah Pink) where everyone has dollar signs for eyes and the heroes are the savviest deal-makers in the room. It doesn’t feel like a film so much as something zippy cooked up for MBA programs.
The year is 1988. Egerton plays Henk Rogers, who runs a struggling software company in Tokyo. His own games have failed to take off, but after giving Tetris a go at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, he’s convinced it has the potential to be a hit. “I played Tetris for five minutes,” he tells his dubious banker. “I still see falling blocks in my dreams.”
All he has to do is get the rights.
Not as simple as it sounds. There are some third parties in the way, specifically Robert Maxwell — a real-world, London-based equivalent of “Succession’s” Logan Roy — and he proves to be a serious impediment to Henk’s aw-shucks ambitions.
So Henk teams up with Nintendo’s operations in Seattle instead — they’re about to launch the Game Boy — and he sees a loophole: Nobody has obtained the handheld rights for Tetris yet. Those are up for grabs. The most direct route, Henk decides, is to go to Moscow and get things nailed down himself.
Licensing those rights from the Soviet Union and the shadowy figures he encounters would prove to be its own complication and this is the movie’s most interesting narrative gambit: How do you negotiate with a government you don’t understand, let alone one on the brink of collapse? When the people with whom you’re meeting might just throw you — or the game’s creator, a shy, soulful programmer named Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov) — in a Russian gulag? When that dastard Robert is working behind the scenes, promising bribes and muddying the waters?
Just because Alexey invented the game doesn’t mean he’s running the show. He has no power here. Stern men in suits — be they KGB or otherwise — will be making the decisions. Things are precarious. Henk wants to be friends, but he is loud and indiscreet and this puts Alexey in real danger. There’s so much risk — and also moments that come across like Hollywood flourishes, including a car chase through Moscow that somehow makes sense.
The movie’s focus on Henk’s point of view feels like a miscalculation. This is not a story about the creative process behind the game’s development (an explanation that gets all of half a minute here), this is about licensing the game. And that process is treated with all the intensity and diplomatic urgency of negotiating to free dissidents or dialing back the arms race. Sit with that for a moment.
Henk’s contacts in Seattle try to warn him off: “You’re walking into a communist country that still considers America enemy numero uno — if you go, we can’t protect you.” Henk shrugs: “Okey dokey,” like a cousin of Ted Lasso, full of entrepreneurial gusto and can-do naivete.
Egerton is very good here, playing a decent guy who gets in over his head and decides it’s worth it anyway. But Alexey’s story is far more compelling, even if we have no sense, outside of his wariness, what he thinks about any of this. We see him threatened twice when he’s with his two young boys and then later he’s tossed out of an apartment he’s lived in all his life. The stakes are real.
Crucially: What’s the upside for him personally if Henk rather than anyone else gets the rights to the game? We’re left to guess, but in hindsight the answer is clear: Alexey and his family eventually immigrated to the U.S., where he and Henk formed their own company and became rich. But none of this is presented as even a remote possibility during those tense Moscow negotiations.
At least “Tetris” is only a movie, not a nine-episode series.
Some background context on Robert is useful as well. Before his death in 1991, he owned a number of newspapers including the Daily Mirror, as well as the video game publishing spinoff Mirrorsoft. In the movie’s postscript, it notes that he stole $900 million from his companies’ pension funds and had debts of $5 billion, which tanked his media empire. He was also the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors.
Curiously, no one in the movie spends much time talking about the game. Our brains like to organize things and chunks of squares cascading down a computer screen are just begging to be put in their right slot. That compulsion is interesting. Decades after it first hit the market, experts would find that playing the game has proven helpful for people with PTSD. That’s interesting too — and all of it is absent in this telling because the art of the deal is what “Tetris” is concerned with.
That and the profits that would rain down nonstop like the boxy graphics of the game itself.
Just to drive that point home, the Pet Shop Boys sing tantalizingly “let’s make lots of money” over the closing credits.
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'TETRIS'
2 stars (out of 4)
Rated: R (for language)
Running time: 1:58
How to watch: On Apple TV+ Friday
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