Review: Tetris — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Tetris is an imaginative and often charming comedy/drama bristling with characters who find themselves stripped to their core identities because of a deceptively simple, infuriatingly addictive video game.

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Tetris

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: R

Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes

Stars: Taron Egerton, Mara Huf, Nikita Efremov, Toby Jones, Roger Allam

Writer: Noah Pink

Director: Jon S. Baird

In theaters and on AppleTV+

Well, that’s just great. It’s been 30 years since I finally rid my head of that infernal melody from the 1990s video game Tetris. And now, thanks to the new movie retelling the game’s origins, that earworm has once more burrowed deep into my brain.

You remember it: That Russian-infused folk song that played incessantly as you frantically tried to stack an endless descent of shapes into gaps at the bottom of the screen.

You may have wondered at the time: Why that Russian folk song; and why does the game’s home screen feature onion-domed towers reminiscent of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square?

All those questions and more are answered in Tetris, an imaginative and often charming comedy/drama bristling with characters shady and sweet, pallid and powerful, all of whom find themselves stripped to their core identities because of a deceptively simple, infuriatingly addictive video game.

Rocketman’s Taron Egerton stars as Henk Rogers, a struggling 1980s video developer trying to market his new creation, a game called “Go” (“Like chess,” he says dejectedly, “only harder”). While roaming around the exhibit floor at the Las Vegas Electronics Show, he stumbles upon a demonstration of Tetris in its embryonic form.

Realizing the game is a winner, Henk mortgages his home in Tokyo with the grudging approval of his wife, Akemi (Ayane), and buys the rights for Tetris in Japan with the intention of licensing it to the video game giant Nintendo. (A true citizen of the world, the real-life Rogers was born in the Netherlands and raised in Los Angeles before settling in Japan with his wife and daughter.)

Or at least, he thinks he’s bought the rights. Because Tetris was developed by lowly Russian computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov), working for the government (like everybody else), and because the insular Soviet Union has no experience in international intellectual property licensing, the actual rights to Tetris are muddy, at best. Henk may own piece of Tetris — but also, he may not.

One thing’s for sure: He’s not going to get his mortgage money back.

It takes a while for writer Noah Pink (TV’s Genius) and director Jon S. Baird (Stan & Ollie) to map out Tetris’s hopelessly convoluted terrain, which hopscotches from Tokyo to London to Moscow to Seattle and back. But once they do, Henk’s story is off and running.

Those of us lacking degrees in contract law and international intellectual property rights will often find ourselves a few steps behind Henk when it comes to grasping exactly what his latest hurdle entails. But it doesn’t really matter: Among the film’s supremely likable cast, we can tell at a glance who’s a friend and who’s a foe. (Some of the characters change their stripes in mid-film, but from the moment we meet them, we know which ones they’ll be.)

Like characters in a video game, the heroes and villains are defined here with 8-bit starkness: As Alexey the game designer, a noble genius just trying to keep his head down in the brutal Soviet bureaucracy, Efremov presents a heartbreaking image of Russian people — then and now — who despair of ever enjoying Western-style freedom. Doe-eyed Mara Huf plays a KGB agent who, posing as Henk’s friendly Moscow interpreter, fools absolutely no one but him. Toby Jones pops up as a double-dealing corporate attorney who seems to have dropped in from a Ben Hecht movie. BBC veteran Roger Allam, with a booming voice and an impossibly black, suitably greasy shock of dyed hair, nearly steals the film as pompous, corrupt British tabloid king Robert Maxwell — a bully to all, including his clueless son Kevin (Anthony Boyle). As the Soviet technology official who personally likes Henk but is being pressured to hand Tetris’s rights over to the Maxwells, Ukrainian star Oleg Stefan masterfully elicits the Jedi-like power of mid-level bureaucrats who know which buttons to push and when.

With its sprightly pace, Tetris never lingers on any one chapter long enough for us to grow frustrated with our lack of insight. Plus, it’s fun to watch the characters ooh and aah over devices with the computing power of a present-day digital thermometer.

And it’s also sobering to visit the dark, somber streets of 1980s Moscow. In one poignant scene, Alexey takes Henk to an underground Moscow nightclub where the revelers — dancing to “The Final Countdown” by the Swedish group Europe — excitedly share news about the unfolding political revolt in the Balkans.

When, they wonder, will the winds of change blow through Mother Russia? Already, however, we have seen the seeds of post-Soviet corruption taking solid root in the country’s bureaucracy.

We’d like to tell these good people what lies ahead. But then again, we suspect, we wouldn’t have the heart.

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