Tetris: A Muddied Story About A Classic Game

One of the fun facts that tends to be broken out about Tetris (the video game) when one is trying to show off their video game knowledge is that the game actually originated within the Soviet Union. That said, the specifics about how the game managed to escape from behind the Iron Curtain during some of the tensest times in the history of the world are usually not followed up on. Tetris (the movie) sets out to tell this story, however, it is a little unclear in the execution which makes it hard to take as seriously as one would expect for a movie like this.

Tetris tells the story of Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton), a game developer and publisher who discovers Tetris in 1988 and seeks to license it out as a video game in the west. When Nintendo comes to him with information about a new console they plan to release, Henk devises a plan to go to the Soviet Union and secure the rights to release the game for handheld consoles. Toby Jones, Nikita Efremov, Roger Allam, and Sofya Lebedeva also star.

There are some interesting flourishes to the film that elevate it above what one would usually expect from an entry like this. The transitional graphics and other effects are done in the traditional 8-bit style one typically associated with video games of the era are fitting and do a lot to sell the period that the movie is taking place in. That said, at times the movie can be a bit over-reliant on them to the point where it could be distracting when it should just be a nice flourish to keep the viewer engaged between the more tense sequences.

The biggest issue with the movie is that it careens back and forth between a serious drama about dealing with the licensing rights that go into moving a video game from one market to another (especially in the video game industry of the late-1980s) and a Cold War espionage thriller and does not commit to either one of them. Too much time is spent showing how much danger Henk is in at any given moment, however considering this is the story of how Tetris ended up being the second top-selling Game Boy game of all time, the danger never feels real because most people who own a Nintendo Switch know that the game made it out.

The problem with that is that the movie could have worked had it taken the unreliable narrator approach. For those unfamiliar, the unreliable narrator is a trope in which the story is being told by a person whose credibility cannot be trusted for any number of reasons. In this case, considering how the movie opens with him trying (and largely succeeding) to con a banker into giving him a large sum of money to expand his business when he had little success in the past, going with a narrated approach where he may be embellishing some of the more outlandish aspects of the story would have alleviated some of the strain put on the viewer to hand-waive away some of the less believable aspects of the narrative as presented. In a weird way, if all of that is happening in the made-up version of his events, it would have added more tension to these scenes instead of having a betrayal and car chase mean absolutely nothing.

At the end of the day, Tetris is a perfectly serviceable movie that is more than entertaining enough for a historical drama. Some of the historical inaccuracies may be a little more tiresome than enjoyable but there is more than enough there to scratch the itch someone may have to watch a movie about a key moment in video game history. If someone does not have Apple TV+, this is a title worth getting the service for a month to watch, especially if one times it out towards later in the month to also watch the impending documentary Still next month.

Final Rating: 7.5/10

Tetris is available to stream through Apple TV+.