A Minecraft Movie

Minecraft is quite possibly the most popular video game ever. It's one of the best-selling games of all-time (behind only Tetris), it's available everywhere, and while other games may have replaced it at the forefront of consciousness of most in the last few years, it has never stopped being played. It's very likely it will be the type of game that, like Tetris, won't ever stop being played, one way or another, ever.

Even knowing that Minecraft will likely never die, it still feels like A Minecraft Movie comes late to the party. The Minecraft aesthetic, with those blocks reminiscent of old pixel art that became incredibly popular and easy-looking for kids, no longer feels like a novelty. For kids nowadays playing Roblox or Fortnite, Minecraft is starting to feel like a "retro" game. Those who were kids when Minecraft hit harder, between 2014-2019, are probably now too old for this movie. Meanwhile, adult players who may expect something akin to The Lego Movie - a good "product film" - will find nothing of value here.

Despite the amount of Easter eggs, characters, locations, or items brought directly from the game, let's be honest, Minecraft isn't as rich in worldbuilding as Mario or Sonic, whose movies are filled with cameos that made their respective fans go nuts, even with so-so scripts. Minecraft also hasn't been around that long for the movie to carve out any nostalgic feeling. And, being a sandbox game, there really isn't anything to adapt, so the movie uses completely new characters, reusing the very, very old trope of human characters dragged into an animated world.

All of that makes me wonder what's the point of this movie. And beyond the obvious, being a cash grab profiting from the name of an incredibly popular brand... there's nothing else. A Minecraft Movie has bad writing, under developed characters, and its only saving grace is the high quality of the CGI and action scenes, which is the bare minimum from a $150 million movie.

And if it feels that it comes too late to ride the Minecraft wave of popularity, it indeed does. Mojang started talks with Warner Bros. in 2014, but it took nearly a decade to finalise a script and team. Funnily enough, at some point Rob McElhenney and Shawn Levy were hired to direct, with the pair eventually going on to make far more interesting video game related productions, be it the Apple TV+ series Mythic Quest or the film Free Guy.

The plot of the Jared Hess film revolves around a group of four humans that accidentally enter through a portal to the Minecraft world, where they meet another human who has been living there for years. This includes two boring kids, played by Sebastian Hansen and Emma Myers, their neighbour, played by Danielle Brooks - who does nothing in the film - and Jason Momoa, who is the only actor who manages to be a tad funny sometimes, and has an interesting backstory: he used to be a video game champion in the 1980s, but now he is a loser, broke, and running a retro video game store in the middle of nowhere.

It actually is a neat idea, having a retro video game lover in a movie about a modern game like Minecraft, almost mixing two worlds into one, but the script really does nothing with it. It's almost as if the five (!) screenwriters credited in the movie had been asked to create a character based on stereotypes from how gamers were in the 1980s, but also turning him into a metal-head who dresses like he still lives in the 80s and listens to classic rock music, just because nostalgia sells. All of that feels like nit-picking, and maybe it is, but I think that it encapsulates how lazy this movie is, as if the producers had stuck to the first idea that came to their minds without thinking if it made sense - like retro gaming references for a movie based on a game that launched in 2011...

The true protagonist is really "Steve", played by Jack Black, a man sick of the boredom of the mundane adult world but ends up living alone (well, with a wolf) in the Minecraft world, where he can let his creativity run wild. Sadly, Black is not good in this movie: he screams all the time, he isn't charismatic nor funny, his character has no personality, and only at the end
of the film he remembers that he can sing... and it's not really worth it. I insist, Momoa offers the only character who is worth a damn... alongside Jennifer Coolidge, who barely appears in a brief subplot that gets solved during the credits, offering perhaps the funniest scene of the whole movie.

Steve's story is mirrored by the protagonist kid, whom the movie tries to sell us as a genius, although the only thing he actually does is build an "impossible" jet pack and nearly blow up a factory. The movie intends to teach kids to "be creative" as you do in a game like Minecraft, but there is not a single scene that truly portrays that idea: all of the action scenes see them running and fighting with CGI creatures. That's another place where it feels like the screenwriters didn't really know which type of game they were adapting, so they just stole the same idea from The Lego Movie without caring to lead by example.

Released over 10 years ago, The Lego Movie was born as a cynical advertisement of a product and ended up being a wonderful, funny, and poignant film while also being a cynical product movie. Two years ago, Barbie took it even further by allowing a filmmaker to develop her vision while also being funny and entertaining for everyone. But A Minecraft Movie doesn't even try to be good. It may be entertaining enough for children to see their favourite game on the big screen, but it's not funny nor clever enough for anyone else, and lacks a single idea they can claim as their own. It was always going to be a corporate product, but it lacks the characters, ingenuity, or good intentions to masquerade it as a good or even a satisfying product.