![]() ![]() On the one hand, it is commercially shrewd to have a Westerner as the lead of an American movie on the other more creative side, it also positions Tetris as more than just a story of innovation struggling to get out from beneath the weight of the Iron Curtain. The choice of centering the Tetris movie on the man who brought it to the West, or at least popularized it there, is a canny one. ![]() Along the way, he gets the attention of the KGB, discovers Moscow nightlife, and sparks a bidding war for the rights of Tetris that will go all the way up to Mikhail Gorbachev. So in the dying days of the USSR, Rogers has the incredulous idea to fly right into Moscow as a supposed tourist and ask around until he can find the man who designed the game, Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov). There’s only one little snag: the Maxwells and their liaison Robert Stein (Toby Jones) don’t actually have the video game, arcade, or handheld rights to Tetris they don’t like each other and now the Soviet government has found out the capitalists are taking them for a ride. branch is even toying with the idea of packaging Tetris with their new invention… the Game Boy. In fact, Nintendo is so smitten with the game that their U.S. More intriguing still, they’ll sell Henk the license to make Tetris for the video game market in Japan, which is a golden foothold into working with the video game company of the ‘80s, Nintendo. Henk sees the opportunity and cozies up with wealthy yet shady British media baron Robert Maxwell (Roger Allam) and his arrogant son Kevin (Anthony Boyle), both of whom claim to have the licensed rights for Tetris outside the USSR. where it’s currently being sold as computer software. Having already become a highly popular time-waster in the Soviet Union, the game now carries an exotic mystique in the U.S. He is also among the first Westerners (at least on the far, far side of the Atlantic) to see the appeal of Tetris when he stumbles upon it at a video game conference in Las Vegas in 1988. and got married in Japan after following his wife there. He grew up and went to college in the U.S. In the movie, Egerton plays Henk Rogers, a game designer and entrepreneur who is Dutch by birth but a man of the world by experience. In other words, it’s a thoroughly unique rendering of a high-stakes origin story about falling blocks. Hence at a time when most tech biopics still chase the myopic trajectory of David Fincher’s The Social Network, Tetris is a quirky blend of Moneyball meets Argo (or perhaps Kingsman would be more apropos given Taron Egerton’s central performance). Of course, in Soviet Russia, they were just that. Baird’s Tetris is a strange and delightful Cold War thriller where the offices of Nintendo hold a gravity usually reserved for parliament buildings, and licensing rights are whispered of in the same conspiratorial tones as state secrets. Less an actual “video game movie,” or even another drama about tech innovation gone wrong, Jon S. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |