Video game movies used to be a never-ending series of mistakes and flops. However, in the last decade, Sonic, The Last of Us, and Super Mario Bros. have all cracked the code to earn critical and box office plaudits. One of the most popular video games of the last twenty-five years, it was only a matter of time before A Minecraft Movie would make its way to theaters. Despite the promise of endless worlds and stretching one’s imagination, the movie fails to live up to the game’s ingenuity. Unfortunately, A Minecraft Movie falls into the realm of Easter Egg-hunting first, and storytelling second. Outside of Minecraft super fans, this one doesn’t have much appeal.
A Minecraft Movie — The Plot
After feeling frustrated by life, a man named Steve follows his dream of becoming a miner. While digging, he finds a glowing blue cube ( and a clear cube-like artifact. When combined, they create a portal to another world. However, Steve gets attacked by the evil Piglin Witch Malgosha, forcing him to send his wolf companion into the real world with the cube. Years later, a down-on-his-luck video game champion (Jason Momoa), an entrepreneur (Danielle Brooks), and a pair of siblings (Sebastian Hansen & Emma Myers) find the cube and return to the Overworld.
A Minecraft Movie is a green-screen mess.
Director Jared Hess did not necessarily scream “Director of the Minecraft movie” when it was announced, and frankly, that issue rears its head quickly. A Minecraft Movie works when Hess showcases practical environments or the characters holding physical objects in their hands. However, more often than not, the audience watches an insert or reaction shot of an actor saying one line, while the world around them drastically changes.
The choice to make an animated world around them immediately backfires, especially when the heroes react to a creature off-screen (it is supposed to just be a zombie), only for the next shot to be focused on Momoa fighting skeletons on the ground. The actual editing and basic cinematic storytelling go out the window multiple times in A Minecraft Movie, and as a result, the seams of the film are more obvious than your typical blockbuster.
Most of A Minecraft Movie resembles a local weatherman’s report, and it always feels jarring. While some movies (like Sonic) have found a way for the animated characters to exist in real-world settings, the inverse does not work. A Minecraft Movie would be better as a fully animated experience with these same actors, in part because we would eventually adapt to the cartoonish visuals in the movie (see Transformers One). However, the blending of the two worlds is visually messy and never delivers the Wizard of Oz effect the movie begs for you to see.
To make matters worse, ADR voiceover is still used to overexplain a world that is not complicated. Even worse, there will be two characters in the same environment, and rather than put both actors in the scene, we hear the off-screen character to deliver more exposition. It’s especially atrocious when Jack Black lays out long monologues of backstory, only for the movie to skip ahead to the events after the action.
These stories sound more exciting than anything the movie delivers, but they also highlight one of Hollywood’s worst new trends. IP-driven blockbusters and streaming films often use this technique to help distracted audiences follow along with the movie. However, if you’re locked into the movie, this becomes a grating experience.
The comedy in A Minecraft Movie relies on random jokes and bad one-liners.
While Hess does not deliver great visuals, one could see how a Napoleon Dynamite or Nacho Libre sense of humor could give A Minecraft Movie a unique comedic lens in today’s movie environment. However, you can feel the five credited screenwriters fighting over the direction of the movie, and the jokes are inconsistent at best.
Momoa seems to have dusted off Peter Dinklage’s unfunny performance from Pixels and somehow made it less funny. Black literally skibidi-do-bops his way through nearly every line of dialogue. When you add hot sauce to every bite of mac and cheese, it eventually loses its zing. Black runs into this problem after about fifteen minutes.
There could be some very funny sequences if Hess and his team wrote topical jokes around the various enemies in the game. The closest we get is the appearance of a Chicken Jockey. We also see mobs of Zombies, Vindicators, and a Creeper farm. However, none of these are played for real jokes and, in many cases, are not even obstacles. The best sequence in A Minecraft Movie involves an Enderman, but even that cannot compensate for the many missed opportunities.
Is A Minecraft Movie worth watching?
If you are not a pre-existing fan of the franchise, this is an easy skip. There are not many moments in A Minecraft Movie that will live in the public consciousness outside the fandom. The crowd with extensive knowledge of the game will surely be excited, and to A Minecraft Movie’s credit, it actually has a contained story by the time the credits roll. Given the likelihood that it makes a boatload of money, we expect to see another adventure in the Overworld sooner rather than later. However, they need to figure out more jokes to make this thing work.
Watch A Minecraft Movie in theaters now.
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