In 1988, entrepreneur and video game designer Henk Rogers was promoting his video game, GO, at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics show when he discovered the computer game Tetris. The events that followed Henk Rogers’ discovery were dramatized on March 31 on Apple TV, with the new biographical thriller “Tetris.” 

After Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) first finds out about the video game, he tries to obtain the rights for Tetris for his company Bulletproof Software. The famous computer game was first created on June 6, 1984. The developer was a federal programmer for the Soviet Union named Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov). Alexey made the game on a computer that didn’t even have a graphics card — its sole purpose was for coding and programming. 

Little does Henk know that the game has already been discovered by a man named Robert Stein (Toby Jones) who went to the Russian software company Elorg to try and monetize video games so he could sell them for a profit to a company called Mirrorsoft run by Robert (Roger Allam) and Kevin Maxwell (Anthony Boyle). So Henk tries to secure the rights for Tetris from Elorg for Bulletproof Software before any of the other software companies are able to do so. 

When I first heard about the “Tetris” movie, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Most video game-based movies or TV shows don’t do so well in the box office because of the audience’s negative stances on those movies. But this biopic has to be one of the best biographical films I have seen.

The movie seems to have a lot going on at once, but it’s not too hard to follow. Taron Egerton does a great job in his role as Henk Rogers. He comes off as a typical businessman and salesman. There are moments when you can see that he’s doing it for his family but also that he seems to care mostly about the money and not the benefits. 

Henk’s relationships with all of the characters that he meets along the way are so interesting to watch. He is a very social person — he wants to get to know people and wants the best for them. He spends a lot of time with Alexey throughout the movie, seen as they are the two founders of the Tetris company. It shows how their friendship grows, and how it’s almost a new experience for Alexey due to all of the strict communist guidelines in Moscow.

Henk’s relationship with his daughter Maya (Kanon Narumi) seems to be a big aspect of the film as well. She is Japanese American with her mother Akemi Rogers (Ayane) being Japanese and her father Henk Rogers being American. Because of his negotiations with the Russians he has to miss spending time with his family, which inevitably upsets his daughter. This struggle is probably the part of the movie that is the most real, the most relatable and the most emotional. This is for sure something I haven’t seen done in many other thrillers.

Throughout the movie there is this style of animation done in old retro pixels that will appear when the setting of the story is moved around between the United States, Japan, London and Russia. I think that detail is very fun and adds a lot to the story. 

Although, I will say, for a movie about one long sales pitch, it’s really well done. All of the actors do a great job in their part. Even the smaller roles such as Akemi Rogers and Nina Pajitnov (Ieva Andrejevaite) add so much reality and depth to a story revolving around the computer game Tetris. 

I think in terms of a thriller movie, it does a good job at creating an exciting story, but it could definitely be much more suspenseful. While watching, I never got bored once, but I never got worried about what could happen next — I was never sitting on the edge of my seat. So if it’s going to be labeled as a thriller, it could have been a little more thrilling in my opinion. Nonetheless, it’s a movie about an ‘80s video game. 

“Tetris” does a great job at retelling the story behind the success of the game. Tetris is one of the most popular electronic games of all time and this film does the game justice. It makes you want to go back and play the game.

If you’re in the mood for an exciting, inspirational, emotional and compelling thriller, “Tetris” is worth your while. 

“Tetris”: ★★★★☆