“Tetris” Movie Review

 

“Tetris”

 

Movie Review

 

 

In 2023, Jon S. Baird and Noah Pink will release the biographical drama film Tetris, which will star Taron Egerton and Toby Jones. The high-stakes legal battle to protect Tetris' intellectual property rights serves as the basis for the movie's premise.

 

The history of Tetris is fascinating since many large game firms fought over the rights to this straightforward yet compelling puzzle game once it was released outside of the Soviet. Tetris is wonderful because of its simplicity, and any additional aspects would spoil the game's unadorned beauty. In a similar way, Baird and Pink's film adds too many new parts that begin to detract from what originally made this story so compelling.

Henk Rogers, played by Taron Egerton, is a video game designer and salesman who plays Tetris and almost immediately thinks it's the ideal game. The owners of Bullet-Proof Software are Rogers and his wife Akemi (Ayane Nagabuchi), and Henk intends to give everything he has to make Tetris a global success. This journey will pit him up against people with far more money and influence than he does, including entrepreneur Robert Maxwell (Roger Allam), his son Kevin Maxwell (Anthony Boyle), and the man eager to double-cross all of them for the rights, Robert Stein (Toby Jones). While the game's developer Alexy Pajitnov (Nikita Yefremov) is largely out of the picture, Rogers and the other guys must obtain the rights from the Soviets in order to spread Tetris throughout the world.

The finest portions of Tetris are the bits that are most closely aligned with reality, demonstrating the adage that truth is stranger than fiction. When Rogers, Kevin Maxwell, and Stein are the only characters seeking to negotiate obtaining the rights with the Russian computer company Elorg, Pink's script shines. In these moments, Tetris is kind of brilliant in its simplicity. These sequences essentially consist of these individuals going over papers, making minor adjustments, and trying to outsmart their rivals.

But, the author and director have loftier goals, attempting to examine the demise of the USSR and the relationship of the nation to the rest of the globe. In doing so, they make significant changes to the plot that even people who are unfamiliar with it may recognize as untrue. Tetris didn't need much to liven up this plot, but they added Russian double agents, vehicle chases to foreign airports, and absurdly over-the-top adversaries that might compete with Wario in terms of ridiculousness. The bigger allusion to Russia and the modern world is overt and distracting, and the script makes an attempt to make Tetris a foreshadowing of the nation's impending downfall, the first of many bricks to fall.

While Rogers' family is merely developed to offer Henk even more personal stakes outside of the obvious financial ones, the film's concluding moments make an attempt to feel like Argo. We know Henk will unavoidably miss it as soon as we learn that one of his children has a music concert because we've seen this cliché happen a million times before. Tetris makes an effort to increase the risks and terror, particularly in the third act, and it is at these points that we can tell the story we are being presented is untrue.

Which is a real shame because the specifics of Tetris' real-life history are actually rather fascinating. This is primarily a narrative about the distribution and publishing industries, but it works best when the facts are accurate. As many of us are familiar with the background of this game and the significance of a company like Nintendo in its widespread appeal, the introduction of something like the Game Boy can feel momentous not only for Henk Rogers but also for the viewer. However, there is too much filler in this novel for that potential to ever materialize.

Beyond the cliches and extraneous components used to try to up the drama, Tetris ultimately succeeds because the real tale is an intriguing one in and of itself, and when the movie sticks to these specifics, it's at its finest. This movie may make some mistakes with its pieces, like a challenging game of Tetris, but overall, it's a gratifying experience.

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