‘A Minecraft Movie’ Builds a Whole Lotta Nothing
Jack Black and Jason Momoa’s goofball energy isn’t enough to save Jared Hess’ video game adaptation.
I understand that blockbuster movies these days typically exist to sell more than the movie. Greta Gerwig is a genius, so she was able to weave feminist commentary into Barbie, but the movie is still an attempt to move Barbie products. The same goes for my beloved The LEGO Movie. You can’t neatly separate the art from the commerce, but the hope is that filmmakers will take a product with little to no story and still make a movie imaginative enough to feel like it’s more than an advertisement.
Sadly, A Minecraft Movie does not achieve that escape velocity. Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time, and Warner Bros. has been trying to figure out how to make it into a movie for years. The resulting picture, directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite), feels like smushing previous screenplay drafts together not because they make for the best story, but because given the recent success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie ($1.3 billion worldwide), WB studio heads Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy thought A Minecraft Movie would make a lot of money. And it might still be a success at the box office, but as a film, it’s an absolute mess.
The film starts out looking like it will be about Steve (Jack Black), a guy who found his way into the Minecraft “Over World,” and loved building anything he could dream of. However, he discovers an Under World filled with pig-goblin creatures who want to mine all the Over World’s gold. To protect the Over World, he closed its gateway and sent the key into the real world. There, the key—a cube that goes inside another cube—gets discovered by Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), an arrogant video game champ from the 1980s now on the verge of bankruptcy, and Henry (Sebastian Hansen), an imaginative kid who recently moved to town with his older sister Natalie (Emma Myers) after their mother passed away. They’re also joined by Dawn (Danielle Brooks), a realtor. Oh, and there’s also a subplot where a villager from Minecraft wanders into our world and starts dating Henry’s vice principal, Marlene (Jennifer Coolidge).
What’s surprising here is you have all these loosely connected characters and hardly any conflict beyond “Make sure the pig-goblins don’t get the special cube.” Garrett wants some money to save his store, and Natalie wants to make sure her brother is safe, but these are the thinnest plot motivations and have little bearing on any character development. There’s the idea that Garrett, through his friendship with Henry, learns to care about other people, but Garrett and Henry know each other for less than a day before getting sucked into this adventure. Steve is nothingburger of a character, and most resembles Robin Williams’ Alan Parrish from Jumanji if Alan purposely went to Jumanji and wanted to live out the rest of his life building things by himself. I could not tell you what Dawn was doing in this story and what she wants other than briefly seeing she’s an animal wrangler, and that comes in handy later because the Minecraft world has animals in it.
I suppose the big pitch here is not telling a story or making you care about the characters, but trying to convey that Minecraft is fun. But without these basic storytelling elements, you don’t have a movie. You have a feature-length ad for Minecraft, a game that I still only understand as “virtual LEGO.” The movie feels built around trying to take the things you can do in the game and awkwardly slotting them into plot points. Perhaps for the Minecraft fans in the audience, this is neat, but for everyone else, you’re largely watching human actions run around on green screens like they’re in the world’s most expensive episode of Nick Arcade. The whole Coolidge subplot doesn’t even feel like part of the movie. There’s no narrative payoff, and the summation of its joke comes during the credits. You could lift these scenes out of the film, place them during YouTube ad breaks, and no one would know the difference.
You can feel how thin everything is when placed next to Momoa and Black giving the movie their best. These are fun, charismatic actors who showed up to work, but their goofball antics feel empty because no one bothered to build much in the way of a character relationship. The natural conflict and resolution here would seem to be that Garrett, who came from an older generation of gamers where video games had to be “won” conflicts with Steve, who plays for the sake of play, and learning that there’s more to life than winning while Steve learns that games are better played with others. But none of that is here. Instead, you get a scene of Jack Black kind of riding a flying Jason Momoa like he’s Falkor from The Neverending Story (h/t Liz Shannon Miller for the reference). That’s certainly a lively moment, but it lacks weight because we don’t care about Steve, Garrett, or any of the characters. They exist to do Minecraft stuff under the assumption the audience will be thrilled to see Minecraft stuff.
Better films do not fall into this trap. They appreciate the material but understand that rather than coasting on branding, they will have to make sure the audience is on board regardless of how much they like Barbie, LEGO, or Minecraft. Some will say that any movie based on a toy or a game should be discarded immediately anyway, but I feel like that misses the opportunities for creativity and how to surprise the audience. However, for A Minecraft Movie to be so dull when its success comes from the creativity of its players feels particularly egregious.
It’s here where I could say, “Well, at least kids might like it,” but I’ll tell you that I brought my friend and his six-year-old son to my screening, and I kept glancing over at the kid, who was largely stonefaced during the movie. I couldn’t blame him since the film, as colorful and hyperactive as it is, plays as largely inert. You have a big opening sequence of Steve enjoying Minecraft only to backtrack to the real world for 20-25 minutes as we set up a bunch of hollow plotlines. There’s rarely a sense of what makes Minecraft special as much as it’s a product demonstration of what Minecraft is. This may be somewhat helpful for parents who wonder what their kids are doing all day as they move around different kinds of cubes, but as a movie, it’s just a big pile of pixels.
What I’m Watching
When I saw the trailer, I was worried that Freaky Tales would be little more than another 80s pastiche. Thankfully, the new film from Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck (Captain Marvel) owes far more to a movie like Pulp Fiction than trying to ape a bunch of 80s classics. The anthology picture loosely connects four stories set in Oakland in 1987, and consciously champions the underdog against white supremacists. This makes for a joyous ride, and watching a bunch of punks beat the snot out of skinheads in the first half-hour is a strong way to start the picture. Some viewers may be a bit disappointed wandering into a movie that has Pedro Pascal on the poster only to discover he’s only in a quarter of the movie, but that’s a marketing issue. Taken on its merits, Freaky Tales is a lot of fun that wisely leans into its pulpy vibe.
I’ve also started watching The Studio on AppleTV+, which feels like it was made for film nerds like me. The sharpest thing about it is the idea that its protagonist, Matt Remick (Seth Rogen), is not merely a venal tool of the studio system, but that he genuinely loves movies. This provides incredible comic fodder as he tries to present himself as a true cinephile and fan only to undo the things he claims to love the moment it endangers his position as studio head. While Hollywood is easy and frequently satirized, Rogen and co-creators Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory, and Frida Perez have a clear view of how the industry functions today and places where they can make fresh jokes and observations about it. I’m eager to see how it plays out over the rest of the season.
What I’m Reading
Here are some articles that caught my attention recently:
Go to the Movie Theater by Matt Singer [ScreenCrush] - Singer describes rewatching the 2011 film Take Shelter at home to prepare for a Q&A and then watching it again in a theater and how drastically the latter shifts the experience. Singer doesn’t say watching the film at home is bad, but despite our technological advances in home theaters, there’s nothing that can envelope you like the cinema. I’ve had a similar experience recently where as much as I try to shut out the world during a movie, I inevitably get some kind of notification or distraction. On the one hand, it’s nice to pause a movie when I need to go to the restroom, but there’s power in an experience where the movie rolls on whether you need to take a break or not. I think as much as the major theater chains want to sell the “magic” of the moviegoing experience, to make that magic happen, they need to be less accommodating. More ushers to discourage cell phone use, better projection, etc. If you want casual moviegoers to leave their living rooms, you need an experience that’s better than a larger living room.
The Steelers Are Trapped In A Hell Of Their Own Neglect by Drew Magary [Defector] - I’m fascinated by teams that get stuck. It’s one thing to have up years and down years, and there are teams that always suck, but then there are teams like the Steelers that can make it to the playoffs, and it does not matter. As Magary points out, the Steelers have become oddly comfortable on their playoff treadmill, the owners are apparently pleased with a brand that can coast on its fandom and reputation without actually competing for a title. I’m sure it’s heartbreaking for Ravens and Bills fans when they can’t make it to the Super Bowl, but those teams have Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen, respectively. They’re always going to have a shot as long as those quarterbacks are on the field. The Steelers don’t even have a QB and it’s disturbing how little that seems to bother them.
How Spencer Hall Would Fix Atlanta by Spencer Hall [How I’d Fix Atlanta] - The Braves are off to an abysmal start, not only losing their first six games of the season, but their big off-season signing, Jurickson Profar, was quickly banned for 80 games for PEDs, and one of their starters, Reynaldo López, is on the DL with a shoulder injury. But there is always a sense that perhaps we deserve this. Our team name is bad. The stadium chant is bad. The stadium itself is bad. The owner is bad. No professional sports team is perfect, but as Hall points out, there’s something particularly cringe-worthy about the Braves:
“Sitting in a stadium with 40,000 people doing the Tomahawk Chop in a new urbanist pop-up shop plunked right off 285 is cringe. Watching Cody and his dad from Cumming run across Northside Parkway after parking their F-950 in a Honeybaked Ham store’s parking lot—where it will be booted—to go do the Tomahawk Chop is cringe. Calling all this racist garbage a “tradition” is also cringe, especially since the Chop only dates back to 1991.”
Also, they could change the name and after the whinniest losers had a hissyfit, it would be fine. The Cleveland Indians changed their name to the Cleveland Guardians and it’s not a big deal.
Baseball Reaches Its Breaking Point by Lindsey Adler [The New Yorker] - It blows my mind a little bit that Greg Maddux, one of the greatest pitchers who ever lived, likely wouldn’t cut it in today’s MLB because he didn’t throw the ball as hard as humanly possible on every pitch. It’s not that the batters changed; it’s that teams kept prioritizing heaters and horizontal pitching motions, and for the last two decades, pitchers and fans have paid the price. Once a pitcher has to go in for reconstructive elbow surgery, he’s gone for a year. That’s awful for everyone, and I wish MLB would start celebrating control artists like Maddux rather than encouraging young athletes to break their bodies because it’s the cost of doing business.
“A Wholly Inaccurate Picture”: Reality Cop Show “The First 48” and the Wrongly Convicted Man by Jessica Lussenhop [ProPublica] - There’s something particularly dystopian about the demands of a reality TV show dictating what happens in our criminal justice system. As this exposé by ProPublica shows, the entertainment incentives of constructing an episode of The First 48 was enough to convict an innocent man. The problem with crime narratives is that when they don’t neatly adhere to reality, producers can rewrite them to get a satisfying hour of television. Unfortunately, we have a legal system that can then accept such a presentation as truth rather than looking at the hard evidence. As much as we might be in an epistemological crisis, a lot of people still believe reality TV is reality. It’s why people thought Donald Trump was a successful businessman—the producers of The Apprentice told them so.
Schumer’s Warning by David Klion [The Baffler] - Chuck Schumer has a new book out, Antisemitism in America: A Warning, and Klion reviewed it for The Baffler. What’s interesting here is how Schumer’s Zionism has clearly overrode his Judaism, and I think that’s not uncommon for center-left Jews of his age. For Schumer, the threat of antisemitism doesn’t come from the Trump Administration employing antisemites, or how Great Replacement theory pushed by bigots like Elon Musk can lead to mass shootings at synagogues. It comes from college students protesting the war in Gaza. As Klion points out, there’s no interest from Schumer in the hardships Palestinians are facing. But this mindset where American Jews must support Israel regardless of any atrocities it commits in the name of “safety” is a dead-end for Judaism. You can’t rest your Jewish identity on Israeli politics, especially when its leader is as noxious as Benjamin Netanyahu.
What I’m Hearing
If Books Could Kill did a nice little one-two punch of “Are the Men Okay?” and the men are not okay, but that’s because they keep siphoning up a bunch of toxic messages regarding masculinity. These two episodes do a nice job of highlighting that any assistance to men—culturally, financially, emotionally—is a long way off because the diagnoses are so flawed. Also, if you’re getting any advice from Steve Harvey, please reconsider the choices that brought you to such a moment.
What I’m Playing
I recently started playing a remake of the 2004 PlayStation 2 game Katamari Damacy. It’s very silly, and the point of the game is to take a sphere and start rolling up anything and everything to make it bigger. It’s cute, it’s fun, and I can see why it gathered such a cult following. Also, while not all video games are suited to a movie, you could probably make a pretty good body horror/disaster movie out of this.
