Tetris

8/10

This Apple+ movie chronicles video game entrepreneur Henk Rogers' attempts to get burgeoning hit puzzle game Tetris ported to and packaged with the Game Boy. However, he ends up tangling with an unexpected sheer mess of who owns the rights to distribute the game, and has to go to Russia near the fall of the Soviet Union in order to negotiate a deal in a country where trade is handled rather differently.

Like most movies based on a true story you got some made up stuff to make the story more cinematic (you've got a fictitious KGB agent in this who serves as an obstacle for Rogers; don't get me wrong, I'm sure the real Henks was watched like any outsider trying to do busy in Russia, but I doubt he was ever directly confronted), but what I like about this is that all the broadstrokes are surprisingly accurate to what happened. The various issues involved in acquiring the rights for Tetris are true. The whole thing is rather fascinating, especially in regards to how Russia handled property rights and distribution differently from capitalist countries. 

Rogers (played by The King's Man's Taron Egerton) also makes for a good underdog. Some of these films may hide less savory aspects of their subjects or make them more important than they actually were, (and yeah, movie Henk takes risks the original didn't), but the actual Henk seems fairly faithful to this one. He doesn't seem to have any skeletons in his closet and he really did befriend Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov (played in this by Nikita Efremov) and helped him get compensated for his creation later on. Film Henk makes for a great protagonist as a man who unwittingly bit off more than he could chew and still manages to come out successful.

The father son team running rival company Mirrorsoft Robert and Kevin Maxwell (Roger Allam, the villain from the Speed Racer movie and Anthony Boyle) also works well as rivals. Yeah, they're probably more cartoon villainy in this, but I don't mind the liberties too much 'cuz they were crooked in real life (and it didn't help the they were/are the father of Ghislaine Maxwell).

Pretty good cast here. Egerton gives a solid performance, but to be honest this is a role many actors could do. He's outshined by some of the supporting cast. Efremov is convincing as a man who created a fun diversion at work who had no greater plans and finds himself unexpectedly put in a spotlight. Allam does a great job delivering the type of commanding presence who rarely needs to raise their voice, and Boyle is also swell as the more emotional one with a chip on their shoulder. However, I was most impressed by Oleg Stefan as Nikolai Belikov, the head of ELORG, the Soviet organization that handles electronics exports and imports. He plays a straight man bureaucrat, but the actor has this subtlety in his emotions that really pay off.

There are a couple of scenes in this that are a little weak but don't sink the movie. You got one line of dialogue evoking the spirit of video games that feels really ham-fisted, insultingly simplistic, and nothing any person would say aloud. Then there's one scene demonstrating the struggles of living in the Soviet Union that feels a little too on-the-nose.

If you love the Tetris theme, you get a variation or two of it, but sadly we never get to hear the very original unadulterated version.

Recommended. Some may think that you couldn't make a movie about distribution rights interesting, but they pulled it off.