Tetris

Are the streaming wars finally over? New home-entertainment technology created a new tier in film-making; something above tv movies and straight to video, but landing below cinema; that new tier was called streaming, and Netflix and Amazon led the way as disruptors to the existing business model of cinema and ancillary markets. But pouring cash into making films and tv shows that nobody sees can only go on for so long; Apple have had more success with content than most, from best picture winner CODA to beloved sitcom Ted Lasso, but the numbers aren’t stacking the right way for them either; last week, they announced a billion dollar a year investment in new content to be screened in movie theatres, rather than just dumped unwatched on their own website.

Which brings us to Tetris, which bypasses cinemas outside SXSW to stream directly to the lesser-spotted viewers of AppleTV+ from March 31^st. It’s a goofy, lightweight narrative that fabricates an elaborate commercial espionage story about the licencing of the game Tetris. While the title Tetris will certainly offer a high recognisability factor for potential viewers, particularly for the Apple brand that cultivated games like Prince of Persia as a way of selling hardware, the result rarely touches on the actual game itself; this is the traditional boastful-boys tall-tale, about getting into dire financial scrapes and emerging triumphant.

Taron Egerton plays game publisher Henk Rogers, who also executive produced his own story here; the conflict comes when Rogers, to the distress of his wife and family, bets his Tokyo house on getting the handheld rights to the Tetris game in the hope of bundling it with the Gameboy system. Rogers flies to Moscow, supposedly as a tourist, but hoping to re-negotiate his deal with the game’s creators; there’s direct competition from the criminal Maxwell family, notably Robert (Roger Allam) and his son Kevin (Anthony Boyle).

Director Jon S Baird slathers the Tetris movie with 8-bit ephemera and interstitials; it’s cheaper than actual establishing shots, with various Scottish locations from Prestwick Airport to Aberdeen’s Zoology building standing in for a Russia characterised by locals pissing in the street. It’s hard to see how having cars change into cartoons during a car chase adds to the intensity of the story like this, but there’s no real authorial voice or stance here, just a re-run through the corporate shenanigans of The Social Network and the tropes of big money solving all personal problems. There’s a few interesting lines about how the original Tetris game-play was shaped, but Noah Pink’s script isn’t interested in gameplay, instead relying on the usual cringe clichés like the father who has to choose between a business meeting and returning home for his daughter’s musical recital.

A few notches above a network tv movie, but with few aspirations to being identified as a film, Tetris typifies the original output of today’s streaming services; it’s loosely formed because its success or failure will be recognisable only to its creator. So Apple joining Disney by moving back into supplying their future direct content to movie theatres leaves Netflix high and dry as the last of the disruptors, still committed to snubbing cinema; we’ll probably make movies about such corporate streaming wars one day, and hopefully we’ll actually go and see them in the cinema if they’re good enough.