Tetris: gaming nerds will be in heaven – but as for the rest of us...
Tetra, plus tennis, equals Tetris – the game batting away falling blocks always in fours. It makes nerdy sense, even if you’ve never paused to consider the origin of that name before. But did you know Robert Maxwell wrongly assumed he owned the console rights, or that a Dutch programmer called Henk Rogers came within a hair’s breadth of KGB imprisonment for trying to compete?
The proprietary scuffle behind the software – which exploded into the world’s consciousness when the Game Boy was released in April 1989 – is what Tetris is about, plugging it into a current fad for product biopics, with Air (the Air Jordans film) up next, and both BlackBerry and Flamin’ Hot (the story of Cheetos) coming down the pike.
All these films have a degree of so-whattishness to surmount, however weirder-than-fiction their tales might be. Tetris is quick on the draw, hooking us in with extremely cute late-1980s pixellated graphics – for Tokyo-to-Seattle flight paths, say – and a bleepy-chirpy score by Lorne Balfe. These particular pleasures might sound superficial, but director Jon S. Baird (Stan & Ollie) has a lot of fun with them, and so do we.
Noah Pink’s script centres on Rogers (a spirited Taron Egerton), who bought the console and arcade rights at a Vegas electronics convention in 1988 – or thought he did. It turns out he was swindled, along with the Soviet state, which owned the game that downtrodden designer Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Yefremov) devised in 1984. A salesman called Robert Stein (Toby Jones) fudged the global rights deal he first signed, and “sold” chunks of the rights to Maxwell’s Mirrorsoft, right at the point when his business empire was crumbling into ruin.
You can barely see Roger Allam beneath the mounds of prosthetics glued to him as Maxwell, but no one can spit out a command like “just get me Tetris!” with quite his plummy vigour. Various shady deals with KGB apparatchiks dominate the plot – and perhaps the back-and-forth in Moscow gets just a wee bit stodgy.
Whether or not Rogers truly missed one of his daughter’s concerts to strike this hectic deal is by-the-by – that subplot is an out-of-bounds cliché by now. I also lost count how often “the times are changing!” gets declared in boardrooms, both to renegotiate the selling price and pay expositional lip-service to the fall of communism.
Tetris is best when it’s geeking out right in front of us. The unveiling of the top-secret Game Boy to Rogers, like some holy relic out of Indiana Jones, is a terrific scene, and when he and Pajitnov tweak the code together (how about four rows vanishing at once?!), it’s a nerdgasm. There’s no nostalgia quite as addictive, this proves, as the 8-bit kind.
15 cert, 118 min. In select cinemas and on Apple TV+ from Friday
