I will start off this review and tell you action movies are not really my thing unless they are disaster flicks. However, the trailer for Tetris on Apple TV+ looked as addicting as the game (who didn’t play Tetris as a kid) that I just had to check out. And it was even better than I thought it could be.
Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) is an American videogame designer whose life changed when he saw Tetris at a videogame convention in Las Vegas. He loved it so much that he bought the rights for it for Japan for PC and arcade.
He knew he had a hit on his hands, so he went to his banker and secured the money to make it happen. However, since he had a failed business venture with them, they make him put his house up for collateral.
Now, he has to make sure it succeeds, or he loses everything. And he only wants the best for his wife and daughters.
Henk finds out that spoiled rich kid Kevin Maxwell, who works for his ruthless dad Robert Maxwell a publishing tycoon, won’t share the rights to the arcade game versions of Tetris.
Henk is a desperate man, so he goes to the head of Nintendo and tries to get him to invest. That is when he was introduced to the future Game Boy. So now, he must have handheld rights for Tetris so that he can put the game on their console and make millions and millions of dollars.
So he decides to go around the Maxwells and sneaks into Russia to talk to the people who created the game and made the original contract so that he can get their approval to license the game. Russia is still a communist country, and they don’t want to share. The KGB will try to intimidate Henk, his wife, and everyone involved with this deal because Robert Maxwell is in cahoots with the Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
And that is when the movie really has you on the edge of your seat, like when blocks start coming down quickly on Tetris. Remember how nerve-wracking and thrilling that was at the same time?
That is this movie from beginning to end. It is face paced. You never know what is going to happen next. You are not sure who are the good guys are and who the bad ones. However, you are rooting for the hero Henk. You want him to get this game, but there are so many hoops he has to jump through, and he is like Kevin Hart playing basketball with people the size of Shaq.
I honestly felt like I was playing Tetris while I was watching the movie. The vision that director Jon S. Baird had for it played out smashingly. So much so that you feel like you don’t have time to breathe because you don’t want to miss a single second of the story.
A story that makes something we grew up with so much more interesting. Who knew all of this went on? But most of it did, and that is why it is so great that it got told.
It made me want to download and play Tetris again. But only after the movie ended because nothing was going to distract me from it. I can’t wait to watch it again because I am sure I missed so many little things.
So if you are looking for an action movie that is not all about cheap thrills, then you need to watch Tetris as soon as you get home. I promise you will enjoy it as much as I did. Actually, you will probably enjoy it even more because action movies are your thing.
