Co-wrote by Mitchell Drennen (staff) & Marcus Little (contributing)
As children, we yearned for stories “crafted” by only the best. Tales that could “build” our imaginations and “mine” away at the dullness of reality.
“A Minecraft Movie,” directed by Jared Hess, may be exactly what we were looking for (it’s not). We’ve been playing Minecraft for over a decade now, and a movie always seemed inevitable.
We thought that when the movie was finally released, it would probably be soulless and cash-grabby like many other video game film adaptations.
“A Minecraft Movie” fits that bill in many ways. The plot sees Steve (Jack Black) accompanied by Garret “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), Natalie (Emma Myers), Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and Dawn (Danielle Brooks) accidentally enter a portal into the “Over World,” where they go on an adventure to find a magic crystal that will let them return home to our world while evading an army of humanoid pigs from the “Nether.”
The plot meanders for a bit too long in the real world before the characters go into Minecraft, and it is surprisingly uncreative for a movie based on a game highly praised as a creative outlet.
When we finally got to the more “Minecraft” parts of the film, it stayed mostly true to the spirit of the video game, but the movie’s visuals are definitely a choice. Like many others, we are tired of CGI slop-fests filling up movie theaters. On one hand, the design of the main antagonist (voiced by Rachel House) and her army of “piglins” is fantastic.
They’re grimy and disgusting but still make for fun, if not childish, villains to watch on screen. In fact, all the characters found in-game look decent on the big screen — but they’ve replaced their colorful in-game appearances for a de-saturated look, which loses much of the charm of the game’s iconic visuals.
It can often feel more like the movie prefers cheap references over creatively adapting the game. An inexplicable portion of the script is filled with Jack Black just shouting the names of various things from the game.
While the script is on the table, the dialogue in “A Minecraft Movie” is simultaneously the most groan-worthy and ironically hysterical element of the “film.” To list a few of those references to the game you have probably seen memed on the internet: “I…am Steve,” “Flint and Steel,” “The Nether” and, most famously, “Chicken Jockey.” When we saw this movie in theaters (Mitchell saw it twice. He hates himself for this), the audience full of frat boys and high school students shouted out these lines in unison with the movie.
This gets to what made watching this an incredibly fun and memorable experience we had not had since “Avengers: Endgame”. The theater experience reached riotous levels of entertainment.
So many people were yelling, standing up, clapping and losing their minds in joyous ironic enjoyment. Strangers were screaming out jokes with one another across rows of seats — all the things you can only find with a movie as ironically fun as this.
Despite our issues, this movie is fine. To be more generous to the film, it takes some moments to pay genuine homage to the beloved game and for some reason, Jennifer Coolidge gets the best romance plot seen on screen since “The Bee Movie” (We need a movie of just her and that Villager ASAP).
There is nothing truly special about this film. It fails to inspire or deliver any real lesson apart from the shallow echo of “family is important.” It’s a surprisingly uncreative film based off the biggest sandbox building game ever. What really makes this experience worth it is the fun you can have seeing it with friends and even strangers. Genuinely rating it, it is a 5/10. If we are rating it based on how much fun we had watching it? This movie is a 64/10. Go see it in the biggest theater you can and memorize every line from the trailers so you can scream them with a theater full of high schoolers in full suits and ties.
Staff Writer
