A Minecraft Movie jams surrealism and clichés into the crafting grid
A mix of blatant formula and complete oddity, the film is a failed recipe with plenty of seasoning.
Photo: Warner Bros.
The power of Minecraft lies in its flexibility. Independent of its potential to create complex feats of architecture and computation, of its blocky graphics and ambient soundscape, is a platform. A stage. In Minecraft, a player can build just about anything. But Minecraft can also be just about anything. That’s why it remains such a powerful setting for people to prop up their own stories, their own personalities, years after it was a backdrop for some of the world’s biggest streamers to attract their followings. Much like Grand Theft Auto, it’s a game that serves its players, not the other way around. This means, when adapting it into a film, director Jared Hess and his posse of screenwriters had endless options. Maybe that potential is what the indefinite article in the title of A Minecraft Movie refers to. But this Minecraft Movie doesn’t tap into a vein of imagination. Instead, it resembles someone’s first in-game creation: Dime-a-dozen parts, flavored with personal eccentricities, assembled with a child’s disregard. From these ingredients springs a movie that’s both annoyingly predictable and perhaps the most erratic live-action video game adaptation since the original Super Mario Bros. film went to Dinohattan.
While Minecraft offered its adapters the ability to come up with any plot, its half-dozen credited writers decided to go with every plot. A Minecraft Movie isn’t just the familiar tale of a man-child learning to move on from his past, or the familiar tale of a kid whose adventure in a video game world validates and nurtures the very creativity that’s isolating him from his peers. It’s also not just a story of a different man-child who got stuck inside a game, nor is it just the story of that man-child teaming up with some fish out of water in order to save both the game world and the real world from a host of greedy fantasy baddies led by a pig-witch. A Minecraft Movie is all of those mutually unintelligible ideas and more, stacked on top of each other, mismatched block by mismatched block, until—after 100 minutes of convention and chaos—it finally abandons the construction of its pixelated Tower of Babel.
It’s impressive how arbitrarily the film’s often indecipherable plot threads are woven together, and how breezily the film rushes through its tropes. In the opening minutes, extensive voiceover introduces young wannabe miner Steve and old actual miner Steve (Jack Black). Steve goes from the real world to the Minecraft world; Steve encounters a world-threatening MacGuffin and disposes of that MacGuffin. Then the film goes through another introduction with another clownish big boy: Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa, wearing a pink fringed leather jacket and Pit Viper shades), riffing off of peaked-in-the-’80s pro gamers like Billy Mitchell. Then the film does this process again with this town’s new kid at school, Henry (Sebastian Hansen), and his older sister Natalie (Emma Myers), who now serves as his guardian after their mom’s death. This latter point is barely mentioned, a lingering tragic backstory remnant from another version of this movie. Also the siblings’ realtor, Dawn (Danielle Brooks), is around, though she feels as if she’s been hastily added in after the fact using movie magic.
And yet, before this whiplash-inducing ensemble is inevitably sucked through a portal into Minecraft’s Overworld, A Minecraft Movie also takes the time to invoke some of Hess’ cinematic fixations: tacky clothes, an Idaho setting, tater tots, llamas, dry punchlines, nostalgic failures, and comedy fixtures like Jemaine Clement and Jennifer Coolidge. When a science experiment gone wrong results in the fiery demise of a local potato chip factory’s mascot, or when Coolidge’s extremely divorced character hits an escaped Minecraft villager with her car, the goofy lunacy made possible by this cinematic sandbox gleams like diamonds in a cave. But, in opposition to the film’s half-delivered moral about creativity, these flashes of personality are constantly buried by obligations to the film’s blockbuster structure.