Tetris Movie Review

thesixthaxis.com:

With Sonic, Mario and others making the leap to the big screen, you might have wondered how a Tetris movie could possibly make the same jump. Orange Ricky, Teewee and the gang might be terrific tetrominos, but they’re not exactly three-dimensional characters are they?

OK, so that years-old meme isn’t really the subject of this Apple TV+ movie, but rather the making of Tetris within the dying embers of the USSR and its proliferation around the world. It’s “based on a true story”, so it absolutely embellishes reality with a lot of extraneous details, but wraps these moments around a factual tale that is almost as improbable as it makes out.

At the heart of the story is game publisher Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton), who happens upon Tetris at CES in early 1988 and immediately spots its potential, quickly signing a deal to publish the game on consoles and in arcades in Japan. At this point, Tetris was already a growing success story through Europe and America having originally been discovered and licensed by Robert Stein, but as Rogers bets his future on his sub-license multiple times removed from Stein, and looks to partner with Nintendo to bundle it on the upcoming handheld Game Boy, it quickly becomes clear that Tetris’ entire licensing deal is a house of cards that’s just waiting to topple.

With the vast opportunity that the game represents for everyone involved, what follows is a race against time for Rogers to get into the USSR, to find the government agency Elorg and try to negotiate new rights. On the way, Rogers meets and manages to strike up a friendship with Tetris’ creator Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov) that eventually becomes a lifelong partnership.

Rogers and Pajitnov bond over game development. Image credit: Apple