On April 4, Warner Bros. Studio released “A Minecraft Movie” starring Jack Black.
It’s a disaster.
Minecraft — the source material for the film — is an open world sandbox game first released in 2011. It became iconic for its unique look: In the world of Minecraft, everything is cubes or blocks. The game has vast functionality, allowing players to build structures, fight monsters, fish and explore caves to mine for ore.
The game technically has a final boss — an enormous black and purple dragon from another dimension called the ender dragon — but the game does not force, or really even encourage, the player to find and kill the dragon.
“A Minecraft Movie” follows four humans: Henry, a young boy with a talent for art and robotics who recently lost his mother; his older sister Natalie; Dawn, the real estate agent selling Henry and Natalie their new house; and Garrett Garrison — played by Jason Momoa — a washed-up arcade-game champion turned failing game-store owner.
The characters find themselves going through a portal to the Minecraft Overworld. There, they meet Steve, another human — played by Jack Black — who has been living in the Minecraft world. He was imprisoned by General Chungus and his boss, the evil Malgosha, a humanoid pig sorceress from the Hell-like Nether, who wants to destroy all creativity forever. They all team up to defeat her.
Oh, and it’s a musical.
The movie repeatedly states that creativity is what matters. This is ironic, because this is maybe the most trope-riddled, derivative mess of a film I’ve ever had to sit through.
The little boy is brilliant, but society doesn’t understand him. The older sister is annoying and overbearing and protective. The mentor is a man with a similar interest to the boy, but he’s past his prime and needs to pass the torch. The villain is an old crone and social outcast.
Where have I seen this before? Maybe every coming-of-age movie since the dawn of time.
“A Minecraft Movie” treated its female characters egregiously. Almost immediately, our rag-tag group is separated. While the boys fly through the world and battle monsters, the girls have apparently built a house and tamed some dogs. I say “apparently” because we see none of the building on-screen.
What’s great about Minecraft is there is no wrong way to play, but having the boys do the fighting and the girls do the building seems a little off. Maybe it wouldn’t bother me so much if I got to see them build and tame and explore, but I didn’t. Instead, I watch the boys do cool things, get knocked out and wake up in the cute house the girls built.
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The film is marketed as a family action comedy. But it isn’t funny. What constitutes a “joke” in this film is Black saying words that players will recognize in a kind of silly voice. It’s weak.
There were some things about the film I enjoyed. I thought the visuals were well done. There’s a side plot where one of the Villagers — non-verbal humanoid creatures from the Minecraft world — manages to go through the portal into the human world. Jennifer Coolidge, playing Vice Principal Marlene, then hits him with her car, but the two fall in love. That was excellent.
My biggest problem with “A Minecraft Movie” is I feel that it does a disservice to its source material. After watching and disliking “A Minecraft Movie,” I booted up my Minecraft game. It was such a shocking contrast to the movie.
Minecraft is contemplative. If you play single-player, you are entirely alone. There are no human NPCs in Minecraft. The simple visuals, almost melancholic music and nearly non-existent story force a sort of self-reflection on the player.
“Here is your world,” the game says. “What are you going to do with it?” It encourages creativity, certainly, but not as the movie shows it, with explosions and slapstick comedy abound.
If you choose to fight and defeat the ender dragon, you are rewarded with the “End Poem,” which ends with the line: “and the universe said I love you because you are love.”
How did we get from that to Jack Black in a shirt that’s too tight screaming “FLINT AND STEEL” for an hour-and-a-half?
“A Minecraft Movie” performed the greatest possible sin in my book: It was not good and it made so much money.
A film like this making the money it did — about $314 million in its opening weekend, according to Deadline — makes me shudder for the future of children’s movies. Studios will see the explosive financial success and think that this is an acceptable way to make movies. I hate to think of an entertainment landscape full of movies like this one, with stunt casting, sloppy writing, exclusion of non-male characters and fans and endless nostalgia-baiting.
Because it made a ton of money and had an end credits scene, we’ll probably get a sequel to “A Minecraft Movie.” Great. Whatever. Let’s mine this craft until there’s nothing but bedrock. See Jack Black? I can say buzzwords too.
Addison Fulton is the culture editor for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on X @dailylobo
