I’m not a video game person. I’ve tried to be someone who enjoys them, but I’ve never been able to make it stick. I have nothing against video games or the people who play them, they’re just not for me, and I don’t think they ever will be. However, despite this guilt-free confession and self-knowledge about my tastes in leisure activities, I found myself puzzled that a movie about securing video game rights could ever be something I found interesting, but here we are.
As it turns out, regardless of its sometimes dubious adherence to accuracy, Jon S. Baird’s Tetris is a pretty decent little Cold War espionage thriller. It might not be Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy caliber, but it does offer a unique and stylish glimpse into the inner workings of the late-80s video game console wars and the superpowers who fought for control of the industry.
Anyone who was a kid in 1989 (or an adult, I suppose; I was twelve, so I didn’t really care) knows how popular Tetris was. If you didn’t own a Nintendo Gameboy yourself, one of your friends probably did, and watching those little gray shapes descend on that weird yellow/green screen was damn near hypnotizing. What you probably didn’t know, though, was that getting Tetris onto that handheld console was an international effort – one nearly thwarted at every turn by corrupt Soviet officials and greedy game publishers alike.
It’s true that Tetris may embellish some of the events that led up to a simple falling geometry game becoming one of the most popular titles in video game history, but nitpicking such a point would betray the spirit of a surprisingly fun film. The fact remains that a down-on-his-luck game designer named Henk Rogers (played with just the right amount of pluck and nerdiness by Taron Egerton) found himself in the center of an extremely complicated and convoluted rights war over a game developed by a speech recognition researcher named Alexey Pajitnov (played with a fantastic mixture of optimism and paranoia by Nikita Yefremov) in his spare time while working at the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
The real Henk and Alexey, who became lifelong friends in the process of bringing Tetris to the masses, deny some of the events of Tetris happened exactly the way they are portrayed (the tense car chase on the way to the airport is fictitious, for example), but, according to them, much of the surveillance, double-dealing, and underhanded tactics went down much as the film depicts them.
There’s something endearing about unlikely allies standing up to a crooked system and beating it at its own game, which makes Tetris less about video games, console wars, or international relations and more about the triumph of friendship and the human spirit.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.