April 10, 2023
During a consumer electronics show in Las Vegas in 1988, gave developer Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) of Bullet-Proof Software discovered and was fascinated by the new video game Tetris, invented by Russian Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov). At that time, Robert Stein (Toby Jones) held the worldwide licensing rights to Tetris and had a contract with Mirrorsoft, under tycoon Robert Maxwell (Roger Allam) and his son and CEO Kevin (Anthony Boyle).
When he learned that Nintendo was coming out with a handheld game gadget called the Gameboy by Christmas 1989, Henk proposed that Tetris be the packaged game in it. Rogers flew to Moscow to negotiate with Nikolai Belikov (Oleg Shtefanko) of ELORG, the office in charge of computer technology, obtain the handheld rights to Tetris. Unknown to Henk, Robert and Kevin were waiting for their respective turns in the other rooms.
"Tetris" was a very popular video game back when I was younger. It was addicting to move and drop those falling pieces (each made of four squares each to try to complete and clear entire rows. Little did I suspect that an entire full-length movie could be made out of its origin story. Despite the Russian architecture-themed designs and the Russian folk tune-sounding theme song, I did not know that it really originated in Russia, or that there was an international hullabaloo about its distribution rights to PCs, arcades and gaming consoles.
The story of how a Russian video game was made available to players all over the world during the Cold War in the 1980s may seem like a very interesting plot on paper, but not easy to translate onto the big screen. Fortunately, Scottish direction Jon S. Baird had crafted a very exciting movie, despite largely being about contract negotiations and underhanded dealings. I doubt that there was really a car chase going to the Moscow airport or that Mikhail Gorbachev himself was actually involved, but that is the Hollywood fun of it.
It boasted of an international cast. Taron Egerton did not really have the look of someone with a quarter Indonesian blood, but his perky performance kept the energy level always up. Japanese actors played his wife Akemi (Ayame Nagabuchi) and Nintendo boss Minoru Arakawa (Ken Yamamura). The main Russian actors, Efremov, Shtefanko, Igor Grabuzov (as politician Trifonov) and Sofia Lebedeva (as his translator Sasha) played their respective characters with requisite mystery and suspense to keep things nerve-wracking. 8/10.
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