As a fictionalized version of the game’s story, Tetris feels exactly as exciting as your nerdy friend telling you that you won’t believe how the game really came to be.
, explores this complex legal history through the perspective of Henk Rogers . In the 1980s, the game designer and entrepreneur found himself entranced by the game after playing it at a trade show. He went on a quest to Russia to secure the rights to the game—a move that pitted him against businessman Robert Stein , publishing titan Robert Maxwell, and even the KGB.
If this sounds like the kind of thing you could watch a two-hour YouTube video essay about and not pause once, it is. And if you’re looking for a sleek dramatized version of that story,delivers. But the film is also somewhat undercut by its struggle to portray certain nuances. At times, it falls into a rather shallow worldview of “capitalism good, communism bad.” This isn’t necessarily due to a failure of character development—there are plenty of capitalist villains running around too.
This is probably owed more to the nature of history than any failure of writing. As the film makes clear, the final years of the Soviet Union saw greedy opportunists carving up territory during a governmental collapse. This isn’t the era to look at if you’re interested in a robust examination of opposing economic systems. But a side effect is that Soviet characters come off as either wholly corrupt or naively devoted to a dying ideology.
This simplistic view undermines some of the film’s real tensions. It’s rarely ambiguous who the good guys or the bad guys are. Heroes like Henk and Alexey are earnest and noble, the greedy executives are framed less like and more like Thanos. It’s not bad storytelling per se, but for a film full of complex legal and political nuances, these often flat characterizations are a little less than satisfying.
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