Henk Rogers, the man most directly responsible for bringing Tetris to the West, helped set expectations at an early press screening of Apple TV's Tetris movie, which premieres on the streaming service Friday. "It's not a documentary," Rogers said of a film that casts him as a fearless hero working to extract the game from the grip of a brutal, dying '80s Soviet bureaucracy. "Don't expect to see that this is exactly how it happened."
Instead, Rogers said, expect a movie that "got the feeling across, the feeling of being in Moscow for the first time, breaking the law."
All this is immediately apparent if you've read books like The Tetris Effect or Tetris: The Games People Play, which lay out the actual history of the game's long journey outside Russia with much more care and detail. Alternatively, you could hunt down a 2004 BBC documentary that also provides a more direct account of the real drama surrounding Tetris' complicated Soviet-era licensing drama.
Unlike Apple TV's Tetris, these non-fiction takes don't feature any dramatic car chases or airport confrontations. There are no scenes of Russian street toughs stealing someone's Levi's or KGB agents using through-the-blinds photos as blackmail. The documentary accounts won't feature Rogers fantastically re-coding the PC version of Tetris on the fly to work with a prototype Game Boy that he first encountered just minutes before.
Some level of dramatization is to be expected for a movie that squeezes "a year and a half of my life into two hours," as Rogers put it to me in a Q&A after the show. But from the outset, all of the above scenes and more require a healthy suspension of disbelief at the opening claim that "this is based on a true story." If you go in eager to separate the truth from the dramatization, you're going to have a bad time.
Assuming you can shut off the "what really happened?" part of your brain, Tetris has some fun moments and winning performances, especially during the madcap middle section of the movie. But those engaging bits are set amid a sea of melodrama and unsubtle Cold War tropes that can be hard to cringe your way through.
Remember the ’80s?
As Tetris begins, Rogers' attempt to extract a loan from a skeptical banker is used as an extremely awkward framing device for a massive background exposition dump. We get quick flashbacks to Rogers' first encounter with Tetris at the 1988 CES and his efforts to untangle what was already a complex licensing arrangement for the game under Robert Maxwell's Mirrorsoft ("The Robert Maxwell? The media tycoon?" the banker says at one point, in what won't be the last overt nod to audience pandering).
To the film's credit, it crams a surprising amount of technical information about business deals into a short section during this opening act. To do this, though, every character has to speak as if they're dictating a pop history book rather than engaging in anything resembling a human conversation. The dialogue also takes pains to shoehorn in some painful video game references—"I really need a mushroom to stay alive," one character quips about his desperate situation—in a shameless play for audience nostalgia points.
Speaking of forced nostalgia, the movie frequently and distractingly cuts to retro-chic pixel art animations, both for establishing shots and to illustrate historical flashbacks from the characters' point of view. It's a cute enough effect to set the mood for the film early on (helped by some excellent '80s needle drops), but by the 10th or 11th time it was used in less than an hour, I was ready to scream, "We get it, the movie's about old video games!" at the screen.
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