hHollywood’s lazy but lucrative obsession with adapting material that comes with prior awareness shows no obvious signs of abating and why, given the ease it takes to market something new that automatically reminds many of something old. But with other more obvious scraped-off barrel bottoms, from comics to video games, there’s been a recent rise in the eye toward products and businesses instead and an attempt to turn Wikipedia backstories into compelling drama.
Last year we saw TV shows detailing the ups and downs of Uber and WeWork, upcoming movies will focus on BlackBerry, Nike and Cheetos, and this month you’ll delve into the origins of Tetris, the deviously addictive game that quickly became a worldwide phenomenon. As much as these projects have been hit and miss, it’s thankfully a more appealing prospect than a movie based on the game itself, something that was threatened in 2014 as an “epic sci-fi adventure” but thankfully never has been. heard ever since. Tetris, like many of the adjacent shows and movies before it, goes for the same effect The Social Network had in 2010, deftly transforming the mechanical beats of a timeline into the smoother beats of a story, and like many of the adjacent previous shows and movies, which becomes an impossibly high bar to meet. But it does a solid enough job of trying to find it, trying and failing admirably to capture that same Sorkinesque snap, but proving entertaining enough to warrant its existence.
“Is this the most effective way to tell this story?” is a recurring question when watching these kinds of shows and movies, one wonders if a documentary or even a long read would have been preferable. While nearly two hours in, Tetris is refreshingly self-contained and propulsively plot-heavy, avoiding the bloat that weighs down so many 10-part series that could have been told in one part. Our protagonist is Henk, a US-raised, Dutch-born game entrepreneur played by Taron Egerton, and we meet him in 1988 when he tries to sell a game he designed at a convention. It is a failure and his failure leads him to another stall where a Russian game called Tetris is being sold. He immediately becomes addicted and begins a quest to discover how he can become a part of his inevitable success.
The story is complicated, and at times the screenwriter, Noah Pink, creator of the Genius show, takes pains to synthesize its various threads into something as elegant as the movie seems to think it is. Henk’s journey takes him to Russia and the game’s inventor, played by Nikita Yefremov, as well as a software executive, played by Toby Jones, developers at Nintendo and the bloody Maxwell media empire. There are various deals and deals, divided by format and region, with different parties controlling different parts, and despite peppering this exposé with an animated ’80s soundtrack and some 8-bit effects, it can get a little tiring to keep up with. But Pink and director, Jon S. Baird, manage to find their groove once the pieces have been set and the plot begins to thicken and there’s some down-to-Succession fun watching the men try to level up. each other.
It’s a great role for Egerton, an actor who hasn’t always been able to find his footing, slipping from deal to deal, honing a slippery charm that is annoying or attractive to whoever he’s trying to convince at the time. The character is as simple as the graphics of the game he’s trying to sell with routine attempts to flesh out his family life (working dad misses his daughter’s school dance show!) proving to do less rather than more for make it look like someone with some distinguishable quality. As his connection to the game’s creator turns into a friendship, the film also strives for emotionality, and coupled with a frenetic car chase and some cartoonish KGB villainy, we begin to see the ties all too clearly in the last act, turning what felt like a factual retelling into something more fantastical.
But that tally has enough to keep us mostly engaged, in part because we’re still hungry for juicy workplace drama (there’s a reason few office shows like Severance, Industry, and Succession were so popular last year) and that’s essentially what it’s all about, characters in suits trying to get what they want from each other, no matter how ruthless they might make them. Tetris finds his amusement in the details of the contracts and the specifications of the deals, realizing that even when he’s not on a screen in his hands, it’s all one big game.
