Tetris review – rise of 80s game makes for mostly entertaining drama

An Apple TV+ movie tells the compelling story of how Tetris found its way out of Russia but adds a few too many flourishes

Hollywood’s lazy yet lucrative obsession with adapting material that carries a pre-awareness with it shows no obvious sign of abating and why would it given the ease that comes with marketing something new that automatically reminds so many of something old. But with other, more obvious barrel bottoms scraped, from comic books to video games, there’s been a recent rise in looking toward products and businesses instead and an attempt to turn Wikipedia backstories into compelling dramas.

Last year saw TV shows detailing the ups and downs of Uber and WeWork, upcoming films will focus on BlackBerry, Nike and Cheetos and this month sees a delve into the origins of Tetris, the deviously addictive game that quickly become a worldwide phenomenon. As hit-and-miss as these projects have often been, it is thankfully a more appealing prospect than a film based on the game itself, something that was threatened back in 2014 as an “epic sci-fi adventure” but has mercifully never been heard of since. Tetris, like many of the adjacent shows and films before it, is aiming for the same effect that The Social Network had back in 2010, slickly transforming the mechanical beats of a timeline into the smoother beats of a story, and like many of the adjacent shows and films before it, that becomes an impossibly high bar to meet. But it does a solid enough job trying to meet it, admirably attempting and failing to capture that same Sorkinesque snap, but proving entertaining enough to justify its existence.

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