Tetris (2023) - Movie Review

I have pretty much given up trying to anticipate anything that Jon S. Baird does. With each new release, he not only creates something that stands out wholly from anything else that’s released next to it, but even from the previous production Baird worked on. He's gone from the psychological dark comedy of Filth to the vaudeville tragedy of Stan & Ollie… to a Cold War-era political thriller wearing the skin of a corporate biopic in Tetris.

Yeah, suffice to say, this is a different animal to the likes of BlackBerry and Air. In the process of depicting the biding war over the licensing for Tetris, Baird and screenwriter Noah Pink go back to the blueprint of most modern tech biopics (David Fincher’s The Social Network) and bring new life to the ticking clock tension that most features in this genre try to replicate. It follows Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton), a Dutch-born, American-raised, Japan-based game designer who, after happening upon a Tetris display at a computer trade show, becomes determined to bring the game beyond the Iron Curtain.

Of course, in that very sentence lies the main issue with his plan: During the Cold War, things didn’t just ‘cross’ that border, and the few that managed to did so by the skin of their teeth. Indeed, like a lot of plucky entrepreneurs in these movies, Henk bets pretty much everything he has, from his reputation to his own home, to make this deal happen. It’s just that, as he lands in the USSR and tries to secure the rights (spread out across different computing formats, including the still-in-development handheld), he ends up in the crosshairs of the KGB. Cue incredibly tense negotiations in small meeting rooms where people look ready to bankrupt and/or kill their opposition… over the rights to a video game.

Even without getting into the icy Cold War atmosphere of the film, which really brings out the tension of the many twisty wheelings and dealings, the visuals overall are very well-placed. All of the establishing shots and scene transitions are rendered in this 8-bit rotoscoping, showing the flipside of the narrative by masking thorny political intrigue with classic video game aesthetics. Lorne Balfe’s soundtrack adds to the effect as well, applying ‘80s synths in a way that manages to feel fresh (in spite of how often those sounds have been used and reused in films over the last several years) and strengthening the production’s show of adoration for this era of gaming.

One of the odder things that popped out at me about this is that… well, it shows people genuinely enjoying the product being highlighted. Egerton’s performance in this furthers his reputation as Marv Films’ greatest asset (between this, Rocketman, Kingsman, and Eddie The Eagle), but while he’s solid as the aforementioned entrepreneur, there’s something genuine and pure about just how much he truly loves the game in question. The financial risk he’s put himself in is still at the forefront, so the film never forgets his own ulterior motives (which even get called out at points), but the idea of him thinking that the world would actually benefit from having Tetris available to it stays on solid ground throughout.

Where it gets weirder is that, for a film put out by Apple and (at least partially) funded by one of the largest chemical companies in the world in Access Industries (who are apparently so devoid of self-awareness that they thought billing themselves as ‘AI Films’ would make them look better), this film is remarkably anti-capitalist. Yeah, it involves the Soviet communists and the KGB, but in context, the whole affair is treated as having a ripple effect that not only lead to the fall of the Soviet Union, but led into the oligarchy that Russia currently operates under. All as a result of the Soviets, in the words of the USSR’s head of foreign trade Valentin Trifonov (portrayed by Igor Grabuzov as a man who can make dropping a coin absolutely terrifying), trying to “beat these capitalists at their own game.”

As Henk becomes further embroiled in the machinations of Nintendo, the Russian-owned ELORG, and Maxwell Communications (with Roger Allam adding another terrific villain role to his belt in Robert Maxwell), the story around him leans into the idea that financial greed, ultimately, stifles creativity. The Russians want to hoard it for themselves, the West wants to squeeze every cent they can out of it, and the guy who actually created the game (Nikita Efremov's Alexey) just wants people to enjoy what he made. More to the point, he wants all the higher powers to stop interfering with what people like him do, at one point saying to Henk “Good ideas have no borders”.

As an aside, another sign that the film lands hard on the creators’ side of the situation is that Noah Pink seemingly reserved all of the best lines for Alexey, and Efremov manages to do all of them justice. There’s also how, with all the different parties vying for intellectual control of the game, there’s no one singular company that’s really being highlighted here. Save for the existence of the Tetris Company, which takes place after everything shown in-film, this is a corporate biopic that doesn’t really champion the corporation in question. In cases like Air and BlackBerry, their respective productions did their damnedest to present what are nowadays multimillion dollar companies as the underdogs, a façade that tends to wear thinner the more times you notice it (speaking from experience here). But here, it doesn’t try and show corporations in the same light as the individuals who work for it, and instead focuses on actual individuals, which is immensely refreshing at this point.

There’s something quite fitting about a story set during the Cold War to itself feel like a clandestine operation. It’s a political thriller that champions creatives over the corporations seeking to exploit them, packaged as a corporate product from some of the biggest corpos in the tech and oil industries. As much as I’d usually bring up how capitalist products denouncing capitalism is a depressingly common feature of modern pop culture, the utter gumption to go so against the grain for the sub-genre like this still manages to earn my respect. This is one of the most fascinatingly-constructed films I’ve seen all year, and a layered example of how, no matter what nonsense the powers that be try to pull, the human drive to create always wins out. To quote Alexey again, “Life is hard and we deserve our small celebrations.”