You’ve probably heard something about a movie that goes back to the 1980s to tell the incredible but true story of a smart, scrappy, energetic wheeler-dealer who went to great lengths to woo a genius and secure the rights to a phenomenon that to this day is a globally famous and wildly successful brand name.
That’s right, we’re talking about “Tetris,” the movie! (We’ll have a review of that OTHER 1980s-set movie, “Air,” starring those Matt and Ben fellows, next week.)
This Apple TV+ original film, directed by Jon S. Baird, doesn’t attempt to replicate the entertainingly addictive block-stacking puzzle game because I don’t know how you’d make a movie out of that; it’s a fictionalized and creatively stylized origins story that plays like a Cold War thriller version of “The Social Network.”
Fresh off a triumphant turn in the Apple TV+ limited series “Black Bird,” the Welsh actor Taron Egerton solidifies his standing as one of our most versatile talents as he once again disappears into a role, as he did with “Rocketman” a few years back. Sporting a classic ’80s ’Stache and filling the screen with energy and charisma, Egerton is a hoot as one Henk Rogers, a Dutch-Indonesian video game designer, entrepreneur and dealmaker who lives in Japan with his wife and children but is almost constantly in motion, flying around the world to make his pitches to everyone from skeptical bankers to the late and disgraced billionaire media mogul Robert Maxwell to various Soviet Union bureaucrats and KGB types to the inventor of Tetris himself.
With director Baird and his production team occasionally using 1980s-style video game graphics and 8-bit retro-style visuals to depict Henk’s flights as well as a car chase, “Tetris” has a great look, but sometimes gets stuck in neutral; even Henk expresses his frustration at how often meetings are interrupted and rescheduled. On balance, though, this is a nifty, breezy gem filled with wonderful performances from a stellar cast that includes the great Toby Jones as Henk’s chief competitor for the various rights to Tetris (PC, handheld, arcade); Roger Allam, doing a wonderfully booming and suitably pompous take on Maxwell; Anthony Boyle as Maxwell’s son, Kevin, who insists that everyone call him “Mr. Maxwell” even as almost no one truly respects the little bleep, and Togo Igawa as Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi.
“Tetris” is as much about the vagaries of Cold War politics in the waning years of the Soviet Union as it is about the fight for Tetris rights. Henk zips in and out of Russia in an effort to secure the licensing to the game, which had been invented in 1984 by Soviet government employee Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov) and distributed underground via floppy disks, that’s right, FLOPPY DISKS. With a local named Sasha (Sofia Lebedeva) acting as his interpreter as well as his tour guide through the streets as well as the politics of the Soviet Union, Henk runs into all sorts of red tape (so to speak) as he learns the rights may have already been secured by Andromeda Software’s Robert Stein (Toby Jones), who has made a licensing deal with the Maxwells — or has he? It’s beyond complicated, and there are times when we get lost in the weeds, but that’s OK, because Henk is nearly as lost as we are from time to time.
There’s also a nice little buddy movie contained within “Tetris,” as Henk wins over the initially skeptical Alexey, eventually working his way into Alexey’s good graces, in large part because they’re both devoted family men who would do anything to protect their loved ones. As it becomes increasingly clear that the licensing rights to Tetris will translate not to just a few million, but tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, the fight for ownership rights becomes ever more tangled, with Alexey’s boss (Oleg Stefan) and a ruthless and corrupt KGB officer (Igor Grabuzov) trying to get their paws on those rights. As you’d expect, “Tetris” ends with one of those credits sequences that tells us what happened to all the main real-life players in this story — set perfectly to “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money”) by the Pet Shop Boys — and it’s pretty great that just about everybody got what they deserved.
