In the late 1980s, video game designer Henk Rogers (played by Taron Egerton) stumbles upon Tetris at a trade show. He finds out that the game was invented by Russian designer Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Yefremov) and is under lock and key due to the communist regime of the Soviet Union. He goes all-in on acquiring the rights to Tetris, putting his wife (Ayane Nagabuchi), family and business at risk. If he’s going to be successful, he’ll need to do the unthinkable: negotiate behind the iron curtain.
Egerton comes across like a poor man’s Leonardo Dicaprio and a lot of the supporting cast seems plucked out of local acting classes. Yefremov is the star here, however. Without uttering a word of dialogue, Yefremov forces the audience to connect with his inner-struggle: the communist ideal he was raised to subscribe to while also understanding that he should be owed some sort of compensation for his intensely popular creation.
It’s not easy to make a movie about video game distribution rights and legal loopholes interesting and screenwriter Noah Pink gets credit for that. On the contrary, Jon S. Baird’s direction is curious at times. The decision to use retro video game themes for transitions and animations is to be applauded – just because it’s low hanging fruit doesn’t mean it’s wrong – but to then make them generic 8-bit themes and not Tetris-specific comes across as half-baked and amateur.
As a long-time believer that Tetris is the best video game of all-time, I found the whole dramatized story fascinating and captivating. Had I not grown up with the game, however, it would’ve been just a mildly entertaining look into capitalists doing legal stuff with communists. Tetris the game is for everyone. Tetris the movie is not.
JKG SCORE: 5.5
Untitled Film Project 