A Minecraft Movie – Review

“A MINECRAFT MOVIE”

Directed by Jared Hess, known for directing films like Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, he brings the first adaptation in movie form of the Minecraft video games. Obviously, this comes with a bit of an issue- how do you adapt Minecraft, a game where you essentially make the story yourself? Yeah, there’s a lot of iconic imagery, but you don’t really have much of a plot to work with. Minecraft is obviously huge, it is the best-selling video game of all time just based on sales alone, and that number probably goes up if you count people playing the game via Xbox Game Pass Subscriptions. You only need a fraction of those people to show up to watch this movie and you can break even. 

The film basically recontextualizes the game by saying that the main character Steve (played by Jack Black) feeling the lack of creativity in our world travels via a mine to the world of Minecraft and enjoys life there until the Sorcerer Malagosha catches wind of this and swears to destroy his world because she hates creativity (the reason for this does get explained and it is one of the dumbest villain motivations ever).

The cube that goes between worlds (which looks exactly like the Tesseract from the Marvel movies is taken back to the world by Steve’s dog, Dennis, and as a result we get a load of people coming over to that world, including young student Henry (Sebastian Hansen), along with his sister turned guardian (Emma Meyers) their real estate agent slash zoo owner, (Danielle Brooks, and I still don’t know why she does the crossover part in the movie because she really doesn’t do much), as well as a washed out 80’s video game champion, Garrett the Garbage Man (Jason Momoa).

If I made it sound like the plot of this film is very basic, that’s because it is. But even a basic plot is good if you can build on it- no pun intended. For a film about creativity, this film is incredibly uncreative! It’s very paint-by-numbers ‘get this plot done’, and it really surprised me how little actually happens.

The film has a runtime of 1 hour and 40 minutes, but this must be mostly credits because when I checked my watch after leaving the cinema I swear it couldn’t have been that long. 

I will say it’s not that the team doesn’t get Minecraft, but anytime they put references in, it feels more like pandering or ticking a box instead of doing anything. There are too many subplots that don’t really go anywhere and if they do, they’re resolved unbelievably quickly. I really think that this film was meant to be 2 hours long but was gutted in the editing room. Because it feels like there are sections of this film that are missing. 

Now I really have to discuss the worst part of the film, the special effects. It’s bad enough that the world is SO computer generated that you can basically see the green screen the characters are standing in front of, but trying to interpret the Minecraft world and characters in a sort of half-life action sense really delivers a sense of the uncanny valley. These designs weren’t made to have a realistic look! They are very blocky for a reason- they fit in with a world designed to look blocky. The second you try to introduce actual live action actors into that space or even try to give a 3-dimensional sense to those designs, it looks bizarre! 

This film is also not great to the female cast, who are given barely anything to do throughout the movie. Again, I suspect there was more planned here, but it was gutted. 

While Jason Momoa is giving a decent performance, he is basically playing a character who really got on my nerves. I know he is supposed to be unlikeable, but by the end of the movie I still didn’t like his character at all.

One of the positives of the film is that Jack Black of course throws himself into the role, and I think that he works well for the film in general. I also get a sense that he was given as many musical numbers as he was due to the success of the Mario Movie and Bowser’s Peach song in that. 

The thing about this film that I’m getting a sense of is that people are making it into a meme but to an absurd degree, which I sort of get because the film is quite dull and boring. I was practically counting down the seconds until I could go. There was also a weird subplot about the kid’s school Vice Principal played by Jennifer Coolidge that was bizarre that had me really shaking my head.

A Minecraft Movie is one of the dullest attempts to do a video game movie in recent memory. It was laughable that some of these decisions were considered good ideas. It doesn’t really have a flowing plot, it just has loads of different things that happen one after the other, and the movie strained to get as many references in as possible without much rhyme or reason, which isn’t helped by how bad the writing is- the film has had a ton of edits made to it, expecting that audience for it has such a low attention span that they don’t want any character arc to go on for more than 5 minutes.