I remember in the past hearing talk of various people trying to make a movie based on the popular video game Tetris. Every time I heard about that, I wondered why. I’ve played Tetris. I like Tetris. I asked for a Gameboy in college simply to be able to play Tetris. But, it’s not exactly a game with a plot or anything along those lines. It’s blocks that fall down a screen, piling up at the bottom until you can clear a level. I know if you played well enough, the Gameboy would put up an image of a space shuttle taking off as a reward for a particularly high score. That was it. How would someone make a movie out of that?
Well, there’s one now, but it’s about the fight to get the distribution rights from the former Soviet Union. OK, that makes more sense.
Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton), a Dutch-born smalltime video game producer who grew up in New York City, is trying to sell a game of his own design when he gets an eyeful of a new game: Tetris. Henk is sure this is the next big thing and immediately purchased the distribution rights. Taking these rights to Nintendo, Henk has an interesting story to tell, but the big thing is, he learns that the company is about to release a new handheld system, the Gameboy. Small problem: he may not actually have the rights, and he certainly doesn’t have much money. The good news: neither do his rivals at Mirrorsoft, father and son executives Robert (Roger Allam) and Kevin Maxwell (Anthony Boyle).
To that end, Henk, having put pretty much every asset he has up as collateral, will need to travel to Moscow and get the game rights for handheld devices. He has a number of obstacles ahead of him, including business rivals and a lot of general ignorance over how things work in the Soviet Union. He does manage to befriend programmer Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov), the man who created Tetris in the first place. But the Soviet Union is about to collapse, and the old way of doing business with the Soviets doesn’t seem to work anymore. Far too many people assume the communists don’t care about money as it is.
This was something of an odd movie. It’s sort of a thriller, but I never felt much tension here. It was something of a comedy, but I never found much to laugh at. The movie punctuates scenes with 8-bit graphics from time to time, but mostly it comes down to whether or not Henk can cut a deal with the Russians while other factors are very much in play. The collapse of the Soviet Union is playing out around the characters, and they seem intent to mostly talk about the rights to a video game, one where the creator as it stands doesn’t even get a piece of the pie, and various government functionaries are looking to get as much of their own as they can while they can. Henk may not know who to trust, but he’s also the only really honest broker in the movie.
But that weird tone made it harder for me to really get into the movie. Egerton does a good job with his role, but the longer the movie goes, the less unique it looks as this sort of video-game ish movie that labels different scenes as different levels and different characters with titles like “Player One” gives way to a very standard thriller sort of movie. And again, it’s all over the rights to a video game. I was more invested in the beginning, but the longer it ran, the less I cared.
Grade: C+
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