Game is up: Taron Egerton plays Henk, a Dutch video game designer and entrepreneur, in the movie Tetris. Photo: Angus Pigott/Apple TV
Set in the 1980s, Tetris, a new movie on Apple TV+, based on a true story, is more of an industrial thriller than a historical biopic, while providing the right amount of nostalgia.
Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) is a video game publisher who gets tangled up in a nasty legal dispute over the distribution of what will become the one of the world’s most successful video games of all time, Tetris.
It was originally designed by Alexey Pajitnov, (Nikita Efremov) a Russian computer engineer who does not own the rights to sell his video game under Soviet-era laws. Henk tries to smuggle the rights for Tetris out of the USSR, while brokering with a British company as well as Nintendo.
He puts everything on the line in pursuit of making Tetris one of the biggest games in the world, by bouncing back and forth between different meetings and negotiations, some of which overstep the line of ambitious and go into reckless. The limited patience of Soviet political businessmen and the potential for Nintendo to sue him for fraud adds pressure.
Today, we have Henk’s ambition to thank for the fun we had with Tetris but he is a little melodramatic. This is especially present during his pitch to big businessmen: “It’s poetry, art and math all working together in magical synchronicity … it’s the perfect game.”
Tetris does a great job of piecing together the individuals who thought they had the rights to the game, yet didn’t, the push and pull between communist parties and capitalist parties and the big businesses battles.
There’s a healthy balance of historical fact (one of the film’s producers is the real Pajitnov) and Hollywood dramatic licence. There are the high-intensity car chases and the Russian espionage operations typical of the fall of the USSR, when corruption and dirty deals were rife.
Tetris also sheds light on the actual business of Tetris, without confusing audiences with legal jargon and the lexicon of 1980s computer and video games. It reveals the lesser-known story of media tycoon Robert Maxwell’s involvement in scamming licenses for Tetris outside the USSR.
Tetris transitions from place to place with pixelated video game maps and sequences, and is punctuated with video game beep-boop sounds and suspenseful synths.
It is entertaining and worth the stream. Hearing characters describe technology that is second nature to us today as groundbreaking is a useful comedic device to take us back in time. Tetris speaks to our human desire to create and build, to put things in order. Tetris is the perfect game. — Kimberley Schoeman
Another day, another Apple movie based on a true story. Listen, I’m not hating, just stating facts — look at Emancipation and Greyhound.
They’ve done it again with Tetris and I must admit I was a bit sceptical because, well, for starters, I had no idea what on earth Tetris was. Excuse my ignorance, however, I am a millennial who isn’t much of a gaming fanatic, which is what the film is about.
If you’re like me and have no clue about the game, it was designed in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Russian software engineer.
I wasn’t really impressed by the cinematics of the film — it was the symbolism behind the storyline that had me glued to my screen. Here’s this complicated puzzle millions of people around the world have easy access to through the development of the internet. Meanwhile you watch the characters jump through hoops to make that possible.
Henk (Taron Egerton) makes a compelling protagonist — it’s his discovery of Tetris in 1998 that unlocks the obstacles that have to be overcome to make the game as accessible and lucrative as it becomes.
What I found interesting was the brotherhood that develops between Henk, a Dutch video game designer and entrepreneur, and Alexey (Nikita Efremov), a Russian computer designer, seeing how two different economic systems — capitalism and communism — merge for a common purpose. On one hand you see the adversity that comes with living in a communist society where you can’t own your intellectual property. On the other hand, there’s capitalism where you are vulnerable to exploitation because it’s driven by the desire to make money.
The complexities surrounding the themes of friendship and politics are what made the film worth watching for me.
There is a message about being driven, passionate, fighting for your dreams in the face of adversity, however, I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that both engineers are white men. If they were black, would it even have been possible, for example, for them to not only meet but to institute any course of action without being subjected to racism?
While I am a sucker for a film about overcoming challenges, the reality is that the opportunities we are afforded in society, both during the 1980s and still today, as a black person, are unfortunately not equal.
All in all, Tetris is a great inspirational thriller that has enough material to keep you glued to your screen but if you’re not a gaming fan, or you’re sensitive to political discourse, this might not be the film for you. — Bongeka Gumede