Tetris review – rise of 80s game makes for mostly entertaining drama

Hollywood’s lazy yet lucrative obsession with adapting material that carries a pre-awareness with it shows no obvious sign of abating and why would it given the ease that comes with marketing something new that automatically reminds so many of something old. But with other, more obvious barrel bottoms scraped, from comic books to video games, there’s been a recent rise in looking toward products and businesses instead and an attempt to turn Wikipedia backstories into compelling dramas.

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Last year saw TV shows detailing the ups and downs of Uber and WeWork, upcoming films will focus on BlackBerry, Nike and Cheetos and this month sees a delve into the origins of Tetris, the deviously addictive game that quickly become a worldwide phenomenon. As hit-and-miss as these projects have often been, it is thankfully a more appealing prospect than a film based on the game itself, something that was threatened back in 2014 as an “epic sci-fi adventure” but has mercifully never been heard of since. Tetris, like many of the adjacent shows and films before it, is aiming for the same effect that The Social Network had back in 2010, slickly transforming the mechanical beats of a timeline into the smoother beats of a story, and like many of the adjacent shows and films before it, that becomes an impossibly high bar to meet. But it does a solid enough job trying to meet it, admirably attempting and failing to capture that same Sorkinesque snap, but proving entertaining enough to justify its existence.

“Is this the most effective way to tell this story?” is a question that repeats itself when watching these types of shows and films, one wondering if a documentary or even a long read might have been preferable. While almost two hours, 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 chunk. Our protagonist is Henk, a Dutch-born gaming entrepreneur raised in the US played by Taron Egerton, and we meet him in 1988 as he’s trying to sell a self-designed game at a convention. It’s a bust and his failure leads him to another stall where a Russian game called Tetris is being peddled. He’s immediately addicted and starts a quest to find out how he can become a part of its inevitable success.

The story is a convoluted one and at times the screenwriter, Noah Pink, creator of the show Genius, struggles to synthesise his various strands into something as sleek as the film seems to think it is. Henk’s journey takes him to Russia and to the game’s inventor, played by Nikita Yefremov, as well as a software exec, played by Toby Jones, developers at Nintendo and the cursed Maxwell media empire. There are various deals and agreements, split up by format and region, with different parties controlling different parts and despite peppering this exposition with a zippy 80s soundtrack and some 8-bit effects, it can become a little exhausting to keep up with. But Pink and the director, Jon S Baird, manage to find their groove once the pieces have been set and the plot starts to thicken and there’s some sub-Succession-level fun to be had watching the men try to level up on one another.

It’s a great role for Egerton, an actor who hasn’t always been able to find his footing, gliding from negotiation to negotiation, perfecting a slippery charm that proves either annoying or alluring to whomever he’s trying to convince at the time. The character is as simplistic as the graphics on the game he’s trying to sell with rote attempts to flesh out his family life (hard-working dad misses daughter’s dance performance at school!) proving to do less rather than more in making him seem like someone with any distinguishable qualities. When his connection to the game’s creator turns into a friendship, the film also struggles to bring any emotiveness and along with a frantic car chase and some cartoonish KGB villainy, we start to see the joins a little too clearly in the last act, turning what felt like a fact-based retelling into something more fantastical.

But that retelling has just about enough in it to keep us mostly engaged, partly because we’re still so starved of juicy workplace drama (there’s a reason why the few office-based shows like Severance, Industry and Succession were so popular last year) and that’s essentially what this is, characters in suits trying to get what they want from each other, no matter how ruthless that might make them. Tetris finds its fun in the details of contracts and the specifics of deal-making, realising that even when it’s not on a screen in your hands, it’s all one big game.

• Tetris is available on Apple TV+ from 31 March