by Paul Mount
When rumours surfaced of a forthcoming feature film based on Tetris, the popular puzzle video game created in 1984 by Russian software engineer Alexey Pajitnov, the mind boggled at the prospect of a two-hour movie in which various lines of square boxes tumble slowly from the top of the screen to the bottom. The Tetris movie has finally arrived, courtesy of Apple TV+, and mercifully it’s not based on the Tetris game itself but on the convoluted and often (according to the movie) hair-raising covert negotiations between various interested parties – including notorious and discredited business mogul Robert Maxwell and his odious son Kevin – to secure the rights to the game across various territories and on various playing platforms. It sounds like a dry and rather uninvolving story of boardroom manoeuvring, honey traps, double-dealing and duplicity, but Stan and Ollie director Jon S Baird’s film, from a first-time script by Noah Pink, turns it into a gripping – if sometimes a little bit fanciful – Cold War thriller.
Taron Egerton lights up the screen as Henk Rogers, the ferociously-determined Dutch video game designer who discovers Tetris at a 1988 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He quickly becomes obsessed not only with the game but also its commercial potential – if only he can sort out the frustrating tangle of worldwide ownership rights that has seen various rights promised to a number of licensees and with the formidable Maxwell lurking in the background determined to secure the rights for the use of the game on Nintendo’s new Game Boy handheld device. Tetris stretches the truth of its story a little for dramatic effect – a hair-raising car chase across Moscow in the last act adds some excitement, but it certainly never happened. Still, there’s enough high-stakes drama here involving KGB agents, dodgy business deals and Communist-era conniving for half-a-dozen traditional Cold War adventures. The film broadly follows the line of the true story, but if Rogers can excuse the slight Hollywoodisation of his exploits (and he has), then it would be churlish of us to complain about historical inaccuracy. Tetris is a clever and often witty film punctuated by wry computer game-style screen graphics and Lorne Balfe’s early computer games-era electronic score and enlivened by sturdy performances from Roger Allam under a wodge of prosthetics as Robert Maxwell and Toby Jones as the hapless Robert Stein from Andromeda Software. But the film’s not afraid to get sinister, too, as Henk is beaten up in Moscow, his wife and family in Japan, and Tetris creator Pajitnov is threatened by KGB heavies. It’s the dying days of the Communist era, and ‘the old Russia’ isn’t going down without a fight. But despite its moments of darkness, Tetris is a lively and engrossing piece that, out of necessity, turns what might have been a dry and dusty exploration of corporate greed and espionage into a fizzing and fascinating look back at the growing pains of one of the most famous video game titles of all time.
Tetrisis streaming now on Apple TV+.
