At the 1988 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) promotes Bullet Proof Software’s newest game, Go, to less-than-stellar reception.  As he wanders the showroom floor, he notices a crowd forming around another game, Tetris, and he becomes enraptured by the simple yet addicting concept.  Henk begins to ask around about the rights for the game – a convoluted question given vaguely worded and secretly signed contracts – in his quest for answers about its origin, and ultimately, how can he distribute it.  He will have to travel to ELORG, the main technology center of the Soviet Union, to free the game from the Communist grasp and bring it to the wider, Western world through Nintendo with a new device about to hit the market: The Game Boy. 

Directed by Jon S. Baird and written by Noah Pink, the tech-based thriller Tetris was fittingly released on Apple TV after its South by Southwest premiere.  Running 118 minutes and with a lot of ground to cover, the film gets off to a rough start but gradually, Pink begins to embrace the more globe-trotting spy elements of the script and Baird’s direction matches the commitment to tone so that it makes for a strong finish with some truly exciting sequences. 

At the head of the film, Egerton plays a bumbling developer hooked on a dream.  The role is somewhat reminiscent of his breakout turn as Eggsy in Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) where he played a sharp-witted and smart-mouthed teenage spy.  While Henk is a little less suavely dressed, as the narrative unfolds and more of his planning comes into play, both Tetris and the actor really begin to excel.  There is still this goofball edge about him that borders on comic overacting, but as Henk begins pulling off more and more incremental victories, the performance becomes much more palpable on screen and he proves to be more of an oddball businessman that gets by on luck and the goodwill he fosters with his colleagues. Egerton, along with the writing and directing team, have built up a trust in their audience that the groundwork is all leading to something greater than the first act of the film is indicative of which helps shepherd us through the uncertainty of the opening act. 

He leads a rather wide ensemble cast, and while Egerton has the benefit of being in almost every scene to help build and establish a character, his castmates are not afforded that same luxury and suffer under some of the more bluntly written sequences without a chance to rebound. Rick Yune takes the biggest hit on this front, his character only being credited as “Bank Manager,” is saddled with a thankless part which is almost entirely composed of asking questions that interject in Henk’s narration about the Conference and helps give it structure. It is a role that requires Yune to be in service to Henk and while he does hold the purse necessary for Henk to acquire Tetris, there is no true pressure in these early scenes over talks of collateral and balance sheets. Since much of the first act takes place in the bank office, it makes Tetris feel like it will be an exceptionally cautious endeavor, but once Henk makes the trip to the USSR, the film begins to find its footing. 

Also looking for rights to Tetris are Robert (Roger Allam) and Kevin Maxwell (Anthony Boyle) who have sent their contract lawyer, Robert Stein (Toby Jones), to negotiate with Nikolai Belikov (Oleg Stefan), head of the Russian tech giant. Cartoonishly evil in the film – a case of art imitating life – the Maxwells, specifically the Napoleon-esque younger “Mr. Maxwell,” add some comic relief to the film’s large antagonist cast in the love-to-hate-them roles. This allows for the KGB squad led by Valentin Trifonov (Igor Grabuzov) to take a more traditionally dangerous and sinister approach to his role. The performance is still heavily shaded with mustache twilling affectations, but in a scene late in the film after raiding Alexey Pajitnov’s (Nikita Efremov) family home and giving his young children a gravity lesson on the balcony, he begins showing the ruthless force behind the Soviet Russian government and makes the stakes far more personal than they have been up to this point in the narrative. 

Tetris the game was originally developed by Pajitnov using brackets for blocks as his machine did not have a graphics card installed. Henk, riding in as a white knight, is determined to make sure Pajitnov is included and able to benefit from the rights deals, but in the lengthy scenes of legal jargon, it is often hard to follow, and closing this deal seems more like a personal gain for Henk than a mutually beneficial arrangement with Pajitnov. That confusion only hurts the trackability of Henk and Pajitnov’s relationship until a night at home when Henk sees the original Tetris code and the two bond over the development process in one of the most electric scenes in the film to this point. The excitement of creativity is one of the most noticeably missing aspects of the film, so it is nice that we have this scene as well as a quick scene in Japan when Henk is shown a Game Boy, and while it may not have been the story that Pink set out to write, it should be noted that the creative process was far more engaging than the bureaucracy of who has what rights and where. 

These “Making Of” films have seen a slow and steady rise over the past few years and the genre is poised to erupt on screens in 2023 with no less than four titles in this vein already dated, not to mention this being the third film already this year to be based on a game. Tetris struggles to find its identity as it seeks to mimic the snappy dialog in the David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin penned tech-expose The Social Network (2010) while also utilizing the campy, winking style popularized by Adam McKay in The Big Short (2015) to help keep audiences engaged with all of the legalese which character shoot at each other from across the board room by interjecting flashy colors and cute transitions to distract us from the fact we have no clue who is holding onto what rights. Lorne Balfe’s score coupled with popping 80s needle drops also help, but it is not enough to really capture the attention. Alwin H. Küchler’s camera is also hindered for much of the film, opting to show Russia as a drab, grey, crumbling landscape and there is a shocking lack of color and an insistence on stillness that permeates throughout the entire film built around a game about falling, colored blocks. Küchler is allowed to stretch and have a little fun with a car chase late in the film which serves as a nice culmination for the spy thriller/escape from the USSR tone that the film had slowly adopted and also plays along nicely with many car chase scenes in films of the era which helps to further establish our time and place. The central idea about securing handheld rights to a game, however, is a little too abstract to support the runtime and it is questionable if that was truly the best way into the story. 

Tetris, despite its messy start, ends on a high note and does make for an enjoyable time. With a little more attention spent on developing the game and the personal lives of the characters, it could even be one of the great movies of the year as those sequences are when Baird is at his best, but it is still a very solid effort. The cast across the board, even those in the thankless roles, commit to the ideas and the tropes employed in the script so it all comes together nicely as the ensemble bumps back and forth into each other as they race around the world from office to office and meeting to meeting. Pink and Baird capitalize on every instance of the communication delay which even top-of-the-line business tech had at the time so there is an excitement in waiting for a fax to send instead of the mundanity of receiving just another text message as would be in today’s world. It is hard to justify the necessity of Tetris as it really does not do all that great of a job clearly conveying the convoluted road to the marketplace, but it still mages to be engaging and exciting when it counts, even if audiences are left a little removed from the subjects at hand.