To readers who’ve never drawn breath in a room trembling with the thrum of a Game Boy and the sound of falling blocks—a film called Tetris may sound like yet another slab of corporate product-mongering, as if someone at Apple TV+ put on a cheap Soviet hat and decided to shovel us “content” with extra pixels. But sometimes you walk in wary and come out with a head full of adrenaline and an unexpected faith in the heart of the humble video game.
What Jon S. Baird and his cast have given us is not the usual plodding “origin story” that treats its subject matter with the reverence of a nerdy museum docent. Instead, Tetris is a giddy plunge into the capitalist night sweats of the late Cold War—a movie about licensing a block-stacking game that, at its best, is as propulsive and nervy as any international spy thriller. I sat down skeptical, only to discover, thirty minutes later, that my pulse was keeping time with the theme music.
Let’s be honest: the idea of wringing tension from the process of software licensing negotiations isn’t exactly the stuff of legends. Yet Tetris finds exactly that—drama in detail, urgency in bureaucracy. The film has an off-kilter, propulsive rhythm that keeps you perpetually hung between wincing at the legal wrangling and rooting for its ordinary heroes to slip past bureaucracies and oligarchs like so many descending Z-shaped blocks. The first half hour is a touch slow—a necessary evil as the pawns and rooks are set on the board—but as soon as the wheels start moving, Baird tightens the screws and suddenly you’re slaloming through corridors of Soviet paranoia and Nintendo boardrooms. If capitalism is war by other means, then here, it’s played with every ruse in the book and with consequences that make even an 8-bit puzzle game feel dangerous.
It’s Taron Egerton, revved up and wide-eyed, who keeps the game from stalling out. Egerton’s Henk Rogers isn’t a bland Silicon Valley disruptor but a flesh-and-blood hustler, a family man, a true believer smuggling hope in a fanny pack. Egerton plays him with a winsome push and pull—twitching with determination, but always glancing over his shoulder for the next brick wall. He’s so manic with purpose you half expect him to start whistling the Tetris theme when he runs.
Egerton’s chemistry with Nikita Yefremov’s Alexey Pajitnov is the kind of warm, off-kilter rapport that almost never survives the screenplay’s march of exposition. Their scenes have a crackle and a shy sweetness that keep the film from becoming another dreary treatise on IP theft; here, collaboration doesn’t just feel obligatory but necessary, a lifeline thrown between two men across an ideological divide. It’s that friendship—manifest, still solid in real life—that shapes the movie’s core: for once, the story of a Western entrepreneur and a Soviet programmer isn’t another morality play of theft and naiveté, but a duet of mutual, hard-earned respect.
What galvanizes Tetris isn’t only its nuts-and-bolts plotting (though, like any puzzle, it can leave you fumbling in the early going) but its willingness to get a little weird: a sharp, almost playful retro-80s pastiche upstaged by 8-bit flourishes and a soundtrack that sweeps you along. Baird’s direction is clean and lean, his editing tight enough to give every urgent phone call and border crossing its due, but loose enough to let the film breathe. The last hour is a bracing sprint—the stakes accelerate, the threat of bureaucratic disaster looms, and the chase is as real as anything in Le Carré.
Yes, Baird occasionally dips into melodrama—no biopic is safe from the compulsion to wring a tear or two in the last act. But here, even the sentimentality glows faintly neon: you never lose touch with what’s at stake, and the overblown moments don’t torch the film’s credibility. Instead, one comes away feeling both invaded by Tetris’s world and gently nudged toward hope.
More than a footnote in gaming history, Tetris is a Cold War cocktail brimming with the dangers and farce of late-1980s geopolitics. The thrill comes not from gunfights or spies (though there’s a joyously improbable car chase late in the going), but from the realization that something as outwardly trivial as a boxy little video game could tie together the ambitions of Nintendo execs, Kremlin functionaries, and two men who just wanted a fair shake.
Of course, there’s liberty taken—no fairytale based on capitalism and the KGB is entirely pure. But the film, even at its most dramatized, always returns to a humble, oddly moving truth: games are never just games. And behind every beloved “brand” lies a battlefield of risk, guile, and stubbornness.
The joy of Tetris is its refusal to wallow in nostalgia or stoop to message-movie piety. If you’re a connoisseur of gaming arcana, you’ll find plenty to swallow—tidbits about hardware rights, faxes from the Kremlin, legal loopholes a mile deep—but even if you can’t tell a Game Boy from a Rubik’s Cube, what lingers is the sense of ordinary, flawed, but magnificent doggedness. The film celebrates not just the success of product, but the unfinished business of friendship and the improbable victories of small-time hustlers over the machinery of history.
As I left the screen, I found myself—against all odds—feeling lighter. The movie doesn’t pretend there aren’t losers (capitalism always leaves a body or two behind), but it also gives us a rare and infectious sense that sometimes, through all the grimy deals and flights across continents, the right people win—and they do it together. That’s not the usual story these days, and perhaps that’s why I salute it.
If you still believe stories about resilience and cooperation can conquer cynicism, Tetris is a must-watch. And if not? Well, at least the theme song will be playing in your head for a week.
