Purest fantasy but you’ll love it: Tetris reviewed

Tetris is a righteously entertaining movie about the stampede to secure the rights from within the Soviet Union to what would become the world’s bestselling video game. The question you’re going to be asking yourself time and again – especially during the Lada-ZiL chase scene through the streets of Moscow in which our heroes try to elude the hatchet-faced KGB agents – is: ‘How much of this is true?’ And the honest answer is: ‘Not very much, actually.’

Yes, there is a game called Tetris (which has sold 520 million copies and which you’ve probably played: it’s the one where geometric objects fall from the sky and you have to rotate them so they land to form satisfyingly full, even rows). Yes, it was invented by a Russian, Alexey Pajitnov, a computer scientist at the Moscow Academy of Sciences who created it in his spare time in the summer of 1984. Yes, among those desperate to buy the rights were Robert Maxwell and his son Kevin, and an apparently amiable Dutch-American games designer Henk Rogers. But most of the caper element is the purest fantasy.

This, however, is both understandable and forgivable. Much of the drama depends on contractual small print (the technical definitions of console vs computer vs handheld device, etc.) and bureaucracy (negotiating capitalist deals in a collapsing communist economy). Endless boardroom meetings with lawyers do not a nail-biting plotline make. That’s why, quite rightly, scriptwriter Noah Pink and director Jon S. Baird have turned it into a video game-esque comedy drama replete with cartoonish villains and well-worn but always satisfying movie clichés, like the classy race-to-the-airport to get out of Dodge.

I loved it, as has everyone I know who has seen it.