This might have been the saddest month of movie watching I’ve had in quite some time. Granted, I was doing a lot of fun things, but yikes. I’ve really got to pick it up the rest of the year!
With that being said, I did sneak Apple’s original movie, Tetris, in on Memorial Day. I can say straight away that this was almost nothing like what I was expecting. Sure, maybe if I’d watched the trailer I might have had an idea, but I’m kind of glad I didn’t. At first the stylistic choices of this movie, adding some video game looking graphics to move the story along, made it seem like it was going to be cheap. As the movie progressed though, the graphics were frequent enough that I found it adding a bit of levity to the crazy plot. At times I thought of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World when the graphics popped up. That’s not a bad comparison!
When I say this movie had a crazy plot, I’m not kidding. You do get the title card that it was based on a true story, but even if only fifty percent of what they portrayed on screen actually happened, well…good grief! I know this was 1985 and things were just different, but Henk Rogers was one uninhibited dude! Ultimately, he was a good dude trying to take down a corrupt billionaire and his clueless son, but still uninhibited. Henk stumbles upon Tetris at a trade fair in Vegas while he’s trying to pedal his own game. Within ten minutes of playing the game, he was hooked and decided to take a chance with all the money he owed the bank on the game. Well, only the game in Japan.
Henk has quite the background, too. He was born in Holland, grew up in New York, studied in Hawaii, and then moved to Japan with his wife. I suppose that’s why he wasn’t too worried about going into the USSR to find the creator of Tetris and try to get some handheld rights for Nintendo’s under wraps Game Boy. Evidently back then, the USSR was even more intense than I imagine it is now. If you claimed you were there as a tourist then they better not catch you dead in a government building, which is of course right where Henk went. The amount of surveillance in this country is insane. And scary.
As you can expect, there is lots of confusion and corruption, but Henk is determined. I admire his tenacity to a degree. I think at several points in his adventure I would have thrown in the towel. Being imprisoned, killed, or having your family threatened don’t seem like good trad offs for a game where you’re just trying to get blocks to line up. But hey, this was the 80s and there were only more simple pleasures in life. To be fair, apparently Tetris is still the most successful game out there. I suppose the logic of that game could be applied to similar popular games of the last decade like Candy Crush or Fruit Ninja. People sometimes just want the simpler things in life.
As someone who doesn’t play video games, arcade games, or handheld games, I’m sure some things were lost on me, but I can still appreciate how bonkers this story was. All for a game with digital building blocks. Some people are brilliant and persistent. The high point for me came with the relationship formed between Henk and Tetris’ creator Alekey Pajitnov. Worth the watch if you want to see a movie about a simple game from the 80s as a taut dramatic thriller.