Delayed Reaction: Tetris

Premise: A businessman tries to secure the international rights to Tetris.

"The creator of Tetris never collected royalties on the game because it was made in the Soviet Union" is one of those facts that's been so repeated that it's moved into legend. It's like the fact that Michael Jordan was cut from his high school varsity team. And like that Michael Jordan "fact", it's not quite that simple*. Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov did eventually collect royalties about a decade later when he formed a company in the US. Amidst Pajitnov's exclusion from the profits was a whole complicated rights deal that exposed Tetris to the rest of the world despite being behind the iron curtain. The movie Tetris is an attempt to tell that story in the most exciting way possible.

*From what I gathered, as a Freshman, Jordan was a bit undersized and played with the Junior Varsity team while he developed. Not quite the historical injustice it's made into these days.

I must admit, I was expecting less from Tetris. I don't mean it's better than I expected. I mean I expected the movie to be less sensational. I just came from watching Air, and I was expecting - even hoping for - that. When it's at its best, Tetris is a movie about businessmen in separate rooms all trying to get a deal done in a land that doesn't approach business in the way they are accustomed to. To me, Tetris has always been something elemental. It's like a calculator function on a computer. It's just always been there. I love how this movie looks at it like a commodity. It marvels at the elegant simplicity of it. The movie is great at showing how desired the game was and showing how gaming law was in its infancy. Computer vs. arcade vs. console vs. mobile rights is something few people had to think about before this. The mechanics of the parties in this movie figuring that out held my interest throughout.

Where the movie lost me was in its attempts to turn this into an action movie or spy thriller. I don't doubt that there was a shady KGB element to this deal. When it gets to threatening Henk Rogers' family and requiring a getaway chase, I lost interest. I just fundamentally can't see Tetris as a thing with those kind of stakes around it. Maybe if it was caked in an Armando Iannucci layer of absurdity, I could buy it. Like if there was an audience stand-in character calling out how bizarre it is that the Soviet have attached so much trouble to getting gaming rights. As is, this movie feels like a textbook case of someone padding out a draft with higher stakes until it compromises the original story it's trying to tell.

Despite that, Taron Egerton is good as the businessman who is both determined and in over his head. I was never exactly bored by the movie. And there were enough parts of the story I did like still in there to hold my interest during the more excessive parts.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend