Tetris is one of those crazy games that looks so simple but it can be so addictive. All it is stacking block shapes together to make a horizontal line that vanishes. It was a simple game and it was developed by a Russian using parenthesis on his home computer. So, how did something that looked easy and simple end up becoming the subject of a story out of Cold War espionage?
Henk Rogers (Taron Edgerton) is a Dutch-born businessman of Bullet-Proof Software living and working in Japan in the late 1980s trying to market a successful game but not having much luck. The video arcade game bust of the early 1980s had led to the success of home video game consoles through Atari, Nintendo and Sega in the latter half of the decade. It’s a crazy story that stretches over four countries and three continents as Henk travels from Japan to America to Russia, back to Japan and back to Russia trying to get a deal made. Since it’s set in the late 1980s in the last days of the Cold War, Henk finds himself a stranger in a stranger land.
The plot is too complicated I won’t begin to discuss it at length. Henk was struggling trying to make money he has put everything on the line, including his own home which he shares with his wife, Akemi (Ayane Negabuchi) and their three children. Akemi works with him at the company but he mainly wants to do his own thing. And there’s a subplot about him making it back in time to see his daughter’s recital that I wish the filmmakers did away with but it’s just to make the wife and children relevant.
Henk stumbled on to Tetris at a gaming convention and wants to work out the rights to sell it to Nintendo on their upcoming GameBoy handheld game. There’s only one problem. Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Yefremov) created the game, but since he lives behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet officials are not wanting to give up the rights and even implying that the game doesn’t exist as it’s been developed on a company Soviets say don’t exist so console games are frauds. Henk talks with an American accent despite being a Dutch man living in the Land of the Rising Sun. But to the Soviets, he’s a foreigner working with American capitalists at Nintendo through their American office.
There’s also Robert Maxwell (Roger Allam), of the Mirror Group, and his arrogant son, Kevin (Anthony Boyle), who refuses to allow anyone (other than his father) to call him Kevin. He prefers Mr. Maxwell. They are trying to obtain the rights. (A side note: they are the father and brother of Ghislaine if you want another reason not to like them.) Robert and Kevin do come off as the capitalist bad guys as Henk wants to be Alexey’s business partner and make sure he gets a piece of the pie. But Henk is a nobody compared to the Maxwells and the Soviets are also wanting a piece of the pie. There’s also a negotiator, Robert Stein (Toby Jones), stuck in the middle.
Back in the U.S.S.R., there’s Valentin (Igor Grabuzov) who may just be KGB, but he’s a vicious man who isn’t going to allow Henk to get anything – because he wants some himself. Valentin is smart enough to know that by the late 1980s, the Soviet Union’s glory days were decades away. You can see storefronts with empty shelves and Alexey giving away food to desperate Russians. (In another side note, when Mikhail Gorbachev, who appears briefly in a meeting with the Maxwells, toured parts of America, he thought the supermarkets and department stores were stocking their shelves with a lot of goods to show off. Yet, he was surprised to find out it was common in many stores.)
There’s a lot of characters that we never really care about them as much as we should. Henk may come off as a nice guy determined never to accept no even when he knew the KGB could have thrown him in prison. But he was really chasing his last hope before he put his family in the poor house. Alexey is a nice guy too and I wish his story was told more. He ends up being secondary to Henk. There’s a scene of the two men bonding at a nightclub where Europe’s “The Final Countdown” plays.
But Jon S. Baird who directs the movie on a script by Noah Pink seems to be conflicted on how to tell the story. On one hand, it’s a spy thriller out of the works of Robert Ludlum and John le Carre. But it also a techno-biopic like The Social Network but doesn’t have the same details that pull you in. There’s so many scenes set in conference rooms that could have been better made you get as frustrated as Henk. I’d argue a lot of the stuff was over-dramatized. Just like Argo, there’s a chase scene at the end where Henk and Nintendo officials try to make it out of Moscow in time. (In real life, the Iranian hostages pretending to be a Canadian film crew left on a red eye. There was no chase on the runway with White House officials refusing to approve and Canada had a lot more to do.)
But it’s still a nice story at times. I didn’t care for all the 8-bit graphics at the beginning and the bouncing around from one country to another a lot gets annoying. A lot of viewers born after the end of the Soviet Union might wonder was it really like that and it was. Henk was basically on his own in one of the biggest countries in the world where he had to wait days for a few minutes of an international phone call. When he would return to his hotel room, it would be ransacked. And he really didn’t know who to trust.
Egerton, who seems to be channeling a lot of Leonardo DiCaprio from the Y2K era, does show Henk as a good businessman who could sell ice to people in Antarctica. And Efremov manages to evoke enough pathos as a family man and inventor who was just wanting to provide for his wife and children. Both Henk and Alexey are similar and there’s a great moment between the two when Henk discovers that Alexey is raising his family in the same apartment he was raised in that shows also how different they are.
Grabuzo is also very menacing as his character who implies at one point he will throw Alexey’s children off a breezeway of a high-rise apartment building. But the tone isn’t correct with the beginning of the movie. This is still supposed to be a feel-good movie. The Maxwells seem almost like parody but they did a lot of bad things you’re not surprised Ghislaine would be associated with Jeffrey Epstein.
It may have worked better as a limited series. But even though it seems to get stacked up like the game it self, it manages to clear a level and be entertaining.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 