When I took my kids to see A Minecraft Movie on its opening weekend, I was surprised that they were reluctant to go. It’s not that they don’t play Minecraft — they were especially into it during the Covid-19 lockdown years. But they were worried the game wouldn’t live up to the individualized movies they’d been building in their minds while playing the game.
For the game’s purists, A Minecraft Movie‘s previews had a lot of red flags of inaccuracy. The Skeletons don’t shoot flaming arrows! You can’t cook a chicken with lava! Since when do Ghasts enter the Overworld? And why does the game’s everyman avatar, Steve (Jack Black), look like his favorite type of food is “seconds”?
Somehow, the movie makes an end-run around player expectations and turns out to be breezy, easy fun. It accomplishes the dual task of filling its scenes with little game details people recognize, while also making the game’s mechanics and concept palatable if not fully understandable to viewers unfamiliar with the joy of smelting sticks and iron ore into a fresh set of pickaxes.
If you’ve played Minecraft, you know that there’s a storyline but only if you seek it out. In the fullest sense of a sandbox-gaming experience, players can cater their immersion to whatever they feel like. You can play “Survival Mode” and try to level up with better weapons, armor, and loot, then run off to kill difficult monsters. Or you can go into “Creative Mode” and spend hours breeding cats and then blowing them up with TNT.
My friends and family members have used the game to make ideal houses, create mazes for others to solve, play hide-and-seek, construct elaborate roller-coaster like minecart rails, play team network games with names like Bed Wars, or do a form of Parkour that involves leaping from high places and evading death by throwing a puddle of water at the ground just before impact — a tricky move called a “water-bucket clutch.”
You can also farm vegetables and animals, dig up ore, and make trades with villagers, who have their own jobs except for the occasional Nitwit, a non-playing character too dumb to do anything but further inbreed. (Creatures and animals breed asexually, by hooking up while little hearts float around them after eating — which rumor has it how Elon Musk procreates.)
Minecraft’s success as a game is due in part to its having achieved one of the major game-developer grails: Creating a world that can be altered without undue strain on computer-processing limitations. The solution was to embrace the retro style of large “blocks,” reducing all environments and objects to relatively simple math equations on the X, Y, and Z axis. As a result, Minecraft has the goofy look of early ASCII computer graphics. It’s like virtual Legos. No wonder the game has made a gazillion dollars and has established as many dedicated players as there are United States residents.
The creators of A Minecraft Movie, including director Jared Hess (who started with Napoleon Dynamite and forged a rapport with Jack Black making Nacho Libre), really dive into the “retro” aspect of the game — by going retro with the storyline too. There’s no reason not to; are most young Minecraft players going to know the movie borrows its premise from the likes of Tron? And if so, why would they mind?
I was impressed that A Minecraft Movie took its time establishing characters and situations in the real world before ever visiting the game’s setting. It gives us Steve’s backstory, as an office worker drawn to mining, who discovers a magical cube that zaps him into the Overworld. It’s very much Tron meets the recent Jumanji movies (where Jack Black also has a key role), with even less explanation for why/how people are sucked into the videogame.
Later we meet two teenage orphans, a creative but oft-bullied boy (Sebastian Hansen) and a his older sister, a likable everygirl (Emma Myers) who’s just entered the job market — where she’s implausibly a key marketing strategist for a company specializing in potato products. A Minecraft Movie freely thubs its nose at realism because it knows, and we know, it’s going someplace far more unrealistic. The bullied boy’s absurdly brilliant jetpack-building skills hint at later virtual flying, just as the sister’s potato-publicist prowess hints at….growing virtual spuds.
We also get to know Jason Momoa’s character, an old-school videogame champ who’s desperately trying to avoid bankruptcy by bidding on storage auctions (as in the Storage Wars reality show) in hopes of finding valuable collectibles. Momoa, whose character is probably inspired by the compelling 2007 King of Kong documentary, even has a corner videogame parlor ala Jeff Bridges’s Flynn from Tron. Along the way we meet a tracksuit-encased real-estate agent (Danielle Brooks) whose side-hustle is running a small petting zoo. Gosh, I wonder if her way with animals will come in handy later?
The whole “real”-world setup has a cute, dippy kick. The movie unfolds with the flair you’d expect from a Weta-based production, which turns New Zealand areas (and soundstages) into a good-looking Idaho suburbia — cue The B-52’s. There are scenes at a local high school, presided over by Jennifer Coolidge, a naturally silly actress I last saw in Season 2 of The White Lotus running around shouting “These gays are trying to kill me!”
The funniest line in the early movie is a throwaway, when a dimwitted high-school kid blurts out “My dad says math has been debunked.” It’s a small dig that any kid with a Fox News-watching, anti-vaxxer type parent will understand, and it’s why A Minecraft Movie works — it’s seems plugged in to the recent reality of its audience, making the most of their upbringing at the periphery of our politically compromised world. That friendly, non-judgmental irreverence is bolstered by both Jack Black and Jemaine Clement (in two small roles), who occasionally improvise and tap into a School of Rock-like appeal with kids.
I also appreciate that the movie allows many of its characters to be complete schlubs. Jason Momoa, whose stardom stems in large part from his physique, stomps through the movie with a dorky ’80s-headbanger haircut, a pink Members Only-style jacket, and the posture of somebody who has spent far too much time hunched over Donkey Kong consoles. Nearly all the adults look like people who researched Minecraft by playing it for months with a full assortment of snacks. The movie might steal from Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (and its sequel) a bit, but it’s the anti-Jumanji when it comes to its characters’ muscle tones.
Eventually everybody gets sucked into the Minecraft world, of course. The movie fulfills its basic goal of giving them something to do while exploring the ins and outs of the game world without becoming too schematic. The creative boy excels at using the Crafting Table and making objects, and various doohickeys from Minecraft are introduced and explained with the kind of easygoing humor and un-self-seriousness at which The Lego Movie also excelled.
Jack Black and Jason Momoa become a tag-teaming schlubby duo, not quite a Dumb & Dumber but close enough, and some of their interactions — such as flying together head-to-foot and foot-to-head — seem designed to elicit junior-high giggles about the number resulting from three times 23.
There’s a villain, named Malgosha (Rachel House), who resembles one of those hunchbacked and hooded creatures from Terry Gilliam movies like Time Bandits or Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. Eventually the Overworld (a natural area with some nighttime monsters, also known as Mobs, like Zombies and the shelter-destroying Creepers) is attacked by monsters from the Nether (the hell-like zone populated by Piglins and Ghasts, the giant floating marshmallows that attack you by screeching like braking car tires and then barfing out fireballs).
A remarkable thing happened in the movie theater: Apparently the audience members had all memorized lines of dialogue from watching the trailer over and over. When Jack Black meets the other characters and says “I am Steve…” the audience all said it with him. They chanted other lines too, like one about a “Chicken jockey!” What was going on here? It felt like early training for people who might later attend screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (“Antici…. Playstation”?) It’s as though the movie offers cathartic recognition that just a few years out of their collectively isolated, “lockdown”-stunted childhoods, and with much of the gloss eroded away from social media, kids can safely return to flesh-and-blood communal experience.
Though the storyline doesn’t follow the plot of the game’s Survival Mode, it does make enough sense to carry it through to the end without losing steam. There was no Wither to fight, no Ender Dragon (nor even the End World — a third area of the game that requires a lot of complicated activity to reach), and yet somehow the characters had Elytra (the game-changing wings that allow you to fly, which kind of kills the game’s challenge since you suddenly can go everywhere with ease). The movie does dabble with minecarts (with a purposefully poky antithesis to similar scenes in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), and goes into one of the game’s scarier locations — a Woodland Mansion full of lethal Vindicators and Evokers. The movie nerds out just enough to win over purists, but gives them permission to have fun without fixating on what’s “correct.” It’s just a game, man.
Rounding out the zany spirit of the movie are a handful of cutaway scenes involving Jennifer Coolidge and a villager Nitwit who wanders into the real world. She assumes he’s foreign and takes a liking to his furry-browed blockhead, and the kind of schnoz for which Steve Martin in Roxanne self-referentially quipped, “Is that your nose or did a bus park on your face?” There’s nothing quite like listening to Jennifer Coolidge mimic the nonsensical mewlings of a Minecraft Nitwit. It’s a role she was born to play.
