Minecraft is a beautiful video game. Really, it’s the video game of my generation. In a lot of ways, it was the first truly shared cultural moment of my cohort. It was officially released in 2011, as myself and most of my friends were first truly gaining consciousness, and it only grew in popularity. Adults didn’t understand it.
“What, is it like digital Legos?” they’d say. No, it was something much better.
Minecraft exploits the innate human desire to take control of the world around you, as you are dropped into a randomly generated wilderness to explore and shape into your image, with obstacles and challenges along the way. There is no discernible plot. No story. Instead, you make your own story, extracting resources from the wilderness, building, and fighting the enemies that come out at night.
The popularity of this game is all the more remarkable considering that it was almost completely developed by one man, a Swedish programmer named Markus Persson, who became a billionaire after selling the game to Microsoft. A key feature of the game’s enduring popularity is that, to this day, the game is constantly updated periodically, as new features are added to play around with.
Yet I prefer older versions of the game. There is something so much more calming, mysterious, and even a little unsettling about playing a version of this game that is stripped down without all of the new bells and whistles. I believe that, at its best, Minecraft is not a loud and obnoxious game with more items to collect and achievements than you can count, but a quiet, calming game; a place where you can retreat from the noise of the modern world.
One could imagine that a film based on this game could have fantastic potential. We could follow our hero through this strange and unsettling world as he or she shapes it and encounters fantastic creatures. Such a notion brings to mind the old fantasy movies of Ray Harryhausen.
Unfortunately, the Minecraft movie that came out a few weeks ago is loud and obnoxious. I feel that I don’t need to describe the plot in this review, because you’ve already seen A Minecraft Movie. Have you seen Jumanji (2017)? You’ve seen A Minecraft Movie. Have you seen Alvin and the Chipmunks? You’ve seen A Minecraft Movie. Have you seen Adam Sandler’s Pixels? You’ve seen A Minecraft Movie. This film hits every beat that every trashy movie that Hollywood studios churn out for kids, thinking that they don’t know the difference between slop and magic. But I will describe the plot, if only to provide a cursory reference for those interested.
The film follows Jack Black as Steve, who spends the movie prancing about and shouting gibberish as he tends to do in any movie that audiences have the misfortune of seeing him in. Jack Black finds a glowing cube that transports him to the Minecraft world, and a quirky gang of misfits follows him. One of the misfits is played by Jason Momoa, who I am tired of seeing in everything, but that’s just me. There’s a last-minute ham-fisted message about creativity or something, maybe 5 or 6 standard-issue set-pieces, and they defeat the evil pigs (?).
The plot of the movie isn’t the point, though, because to sincerely criticize this film is to criticize all 400 films that are just like it. Hollywood knows that they can make 400 more movies like this, where they take a well-known and beloved franchise, squeeze it to fit their time-tested formula, and millions of people will gladly eat it up.
What makes A Minecraft Movie unique is how it seems to be uniquely optimized for viral moments and memes. If nothing else, this movie is an excellent case study in social media marketing. Every other second, it seems like a character is spouting off some kind of wacky, silly statement that is bound to be recorded and shared on Instagram and Tik Tok. For example, the movie begins with Jack Black’s character nonsensically wishing he could go mining as a child, but being chased away by a local prospector. The entire sequence looks like it was generated by artificial intelligence, and it name-checks the well-known Gen Z meme “the children yearn for the mines.” How creative.
There’s the side-plot where Jennifer Coolidge is going on a date with a Minecraft villager NPC who wandered into the real world. This side-plot only exists so that somebody on Twitter could say, “I can’t believe that there’s a side-plot in the Minecraft movie where Jennifer Coolidge dates a villager,” and get millions of free impressions and exposure for the movie.
There’s a scene where a teacher in a public school begins a lesson on the first day of classes by lamenting his financial situation. And he just goes on and on, talking about how much debt he’s in. There is no relevance to the plot, this scene is never brought up again. It’s not funny or clever. The absurdity of the scene is the joke. Is this what Markus Persson thought his brain-child would one day turn into when he began creating it?
And then there’s Jack Black’s constant catch-phrases. Several moments of Jack Black shouting features that exist in the game, like “flint and steel!” and “chicken jockey!” have gone monumentally viral and have led to a phenomenon of people going to see the movie so that they can go nuts when he shouts his catchphrases. This is probably the best thing to come out of this movie, which is, in our age of streaming and instant gratification, young people going to see a movie in-person to have a shared experience. If only the movie they were going to see wasn’t a dumpster fire.
A Minecraft Movie totally betrays the quiet, calm, unsettling but beautiful spirit of the original game. So much more could have been done with the source material. Some might argue that because Minecraft is for children, people like me should go in with lower expectations. I would say that it’s perfectly possible to make a beautiful movie for children. Look at the Wizard of Oz, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or any Pixar movie from its original golden age. All of these movies were made for children, but they transport us to a beautiful, magical world and provide us with adventure- which is the exact experience that Minecraft, the game, provides. If only the movie did the same.