Image courtesy Reclusion Films
Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters, a documentary film about a Tetris championship held in 2010, has been making the film-festival rounds for a year or so. You can finally watch it at home on DVD or through various streaming services.
The film follows several Tetris players as they prepare for a major tournament in Los Angeles, teaching the viewer about high-level Tetris play through introducing them to the individual players. It almost completely avoids tackling the subject of the creation of the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Tetris, which is a fascinating story in and of itself.
Don’t expect something quite as polished as a King of Kong. Ecstasy does absolutely have flashes of brilliance; there are intriguing characters and dramatic showdowns, and the film does a solid job of building up its central mystery, the whereabouts and wellbeing of the missing-in-action Tetris legend Thor Aackerlund.
Toward the middle, it takes a turn for the self-indulgent, spending far too much time on footage of a party at which the competitors in the upcoming Tetris tournament mingle and play poker. At a point when the film should be rocketing to its climax, it’s floating along lackadaisically without advancing the plot.
On balance, it does a fairly good job of engaging viewers with a remarkably esoteric subject: Everyone understands the rules of Tetris; Ecstasy carefully peels away the layers of what happens when the gameplay advances to such a high level that it becomes otherwise inscrutable to casual players.