Review | ‘A Minecraft Movie’ can’t build something entertaining
Photo Collage by Braylan Enscoe, Staff Photographer
Spoiler alert: This review contains minor spoilers for “A Minecraft Movie.”
I went into “A Minecraft Movie” with an open mind. I’d seen the trailers and heard all the online reactions. People have been calling it cringy, dumb and stupidly childish… but surely it can’t be that bad, right?
Well, it was really that bad. And somehow worse.
I’m willing to bet everyone knows what Minecraft is. This is a movie based on a game where you drop into a cubic sandbox world to build, fight monsters and have the freedom to go anywhere you want and build whatever you desire. There is no story, no defined characters, nothing you would expect to find in a 100-minute narrative feature film. So any attempt at adapting such a blank slate of a game into a full movie is bound to displease some people. After all, how do you tell a story about a game where everyone’s own experience is completely different?
The answer, at least for director Jared Hess of “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Nacho Libre” fame — alongside a cabal of 28 writers — is to follow every cliché in the book. It’s almost parodic at this point to have characters from the “real world” thrust into the world of a video game/comic book/toy/franchise/other intellectual property (IP) and have to save the day and return home, and that’s exactly what happens here.
There are moments of self-awareness, where it seems like Hess’ style is poking through the studio-mandated checklist of a plot. Set in the fictional town of Chuglass, Idaho, the “real world” is full of offbeat characters and a familiar feeling of early-2000s indie comedy quirk. But as soon as our characters reach the blocky Overworld — the technical name for the realm of Minecraft — the whole thing falls apart.
There’s an expectation in my mind when a big-budget movie made by talented people falls into a hackneyed opening act. Surely, I think to myself, they’ll find some way to subvert things going forward. Surely, I delude myself, they’ll surprise the audience with a thoughtful spin on a familiar setup. Remember how “The Lego Movie” took the Chosen One trope in a direction entirely its own? Or how the “Sonic the Hedgehog” movies fill their tried-and-true story structures with enough earnestness to stay fun and exciting? These are movies made to cash in on popular IP, but they tell thoughtful stories while doing it. Could “A Minecraft Movie” be the next to follow suit?
But alas, no. As soon as the main characters step into the Overworld, the film falls face-first into the bottomless pit of unoriginality and embraces every overused idea you can think of. Minecraft’s iconic protagonist Steve (Jack Black) and his new friends from Earth (Jason Momoa, Sebastian Eugene Hansen, Emma Myers and Danielle Brooks) have to find a magical MacGuffin if they ever want to return home. That’s not based on anything from the video game; the film just goes out of its way to introduce a magical crystal that activates the portal between worlds, about as cookie-cutter a plot device as they come. They face off against the flimsily-motivated evil piglins of the Nether realm who are hellbent on conquering the Overworld and destroying creativity everywhere.
Somehow, there’s enough charm in that approach to make it almost (but still not quite) work. Momoa’s Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison embodies a very charming wannabe-masculine manchild that will feel instantly familiar to fans of Hess’ work, with such a ridiculous wardrobe of pink tasseled leather that I couldn’t help but crack a smile every time he was on screen. Black’s Steve is the most unashamed that Black has ever been, playing the most amped-up version of himself with Minecraft’s classic blue-on-blue attire. The two have an intense screen chemistry, playing off of each other so effortlessly and wholeheartedly that it almost makes me forgive “A Minecraft Movie” for doing nothing creative with its premise. If Hollywood learns anything from the inevitable billion-dollar box office success of “A Minecraft Movie,” it should be that Momoa and Black need to be co-stars all the time.
However, I would be remiss to not mention that “A Minecraft Movie” is also dreadfully misogynistic. Myers and Brooks play characters thrust into the world of Minecraft with no purpose but to fulfill the Bechdel test and occasionally offer aid to the leading men. Despite what middle school boys or the gamers of Reddit might have you believe, Minecraft is not just “for the boys” — Minecraft is a game for everyone. So why should the boys go off on crazy adventures through bombastic setpieces that show off their creativity and courage while the girls are left to traipse around the Overworld with no clue how the video game world works? They constantly worry about and search after the men and struggle to engage with the systems of mining and crafting in the new world around them. In their only moment of real agency, the women become literal homemakers to help the boys heal up after a big fight. They’re completely underserved by the script, and will inevitably only further fuel the schoolyard discourse of “boys rule, girls drool.” It’s deeply frustrating, outdated and careless.
At its core, this is a movie aimed squarely at the Minecraft-obsessed iPad generation. It is brain rot, plain and simple. It is joke after joke and Black saying funny phrase after funny phrase without a moment’s reflection. It is a corporate movie written and made by a committee to ensure it can retain the diminished attention span of even the most senile goldfish. It is a movie made to be memed to death and back, evident by the number of people cheering in the theater when Black says “chicken jockey” or “flint and steel.” It’s almost dystopian in its refusal to contribute anything of meaning to the culture, mining our attention and nostalgia for a quick buck. One of the film’s villains, General Chungus (yes, really, named for the Big Chungus meme) threatens to “unalive” the protagonists, because professional YouTubers who don’t want to get demonetized can’t say “kill.” It is deeply disheartening.
But let’s be real — this is, as per the title, a Minecraft movie. No matter how bad it is, anyone with even a passing enjoyment of the video game will probably watch this movie eventually. And when they do, there is still fun to be had, with bright spots amidst the pervasive awfulness. I personally haven’t been familiar with Minecraft content creators since the early 2010s (and even then, barely so) but a brief tribute to the late YouTuber Technoblade made me unashamedly cry. Jennifer Coolidge, in all her five-or-so minutes of screen time, steals the show. And ultimately, the clichés and obvious tropes are so blatant that with the right crowd, you’ll be laughing at the film all along the way.
But in good conscience, I can’t recommend “A Minecraft Movie.” I remember when it was announced 11 years ago. With all that time, couldn’t they have built something a little better?
