Everything is not Awesome.
Random people find themselves thrown into The Overworld, a magical land where creativity is endless. But they quickly find it threatened by a malevolent force.
Directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre) and starring Jack Black (Borderlands, The Super Mario Bros Movie) and Jason Momoa (Dune: Part One) the movie… is certainly something. The Minecraft video game was originally made in 2009 by Markus “Notch” Persson and was received extremely well as an open-world sandbox experience where the player could build literally anything. There wasn’t much a story, but players could unify and make whatever they wanted; the game pioneered the idea of “sandbox” video games. Notch would leave his creation, and thus it spiralled into what it is today: A massive generational touchstone that has evolved into a corporate franchise. Of course, we now get a movie starring Jack Black.
Unfortunately we’ve seen it all before, and done a lot better.
Now for some background: I play a lot of video games, and I had just graduated from a video games course when Minecraft released. So I know how influential the game is across recent generations. Millennials embraced it. Gen-Z dove right in. Now Gen Alpha are born into it. These statements aren’t made casually either. But even then, I personally never played it; I didn’t see the appeal, but I respected the game’s technical achievement. Someone in Minecraft making a 1:1 scale replica of USS Enterprise-D? Someone making a functional calculator? Very cool. Never wanted to do it myself. So you can appreciate, reader, that I am neither a fan nor like a bewildered parent when I write this review.
“A Minecraft Movie” is a strange title. It is almost like Warner Brothers forgot to remove the article and noun from the list of IPs they had on file; right next to “A Fortnite Movie”. This suggestion of lack of care echoes throughout the movie; it feels irreverent, even of its own material.
We’ve had a few movies like this now, and unfortunately A Minecraft Movie takes after the lesser examples. There’s more Pixels and the 1990s Super Mario Bros movie about this than say… the superior The Lego Movie from 2014. If you are a parent who knows nothing about the video game, heaven help you; because this movie does not stop. It does not care. It will not explain.
We open with Jack Black narrating his childhood “love for the mines”, and how without it his life became boring and drab. Perhaps I should have seen already that this film was unashamedly a comedy, and nothing else. A rapid fire summary introduces us to The Overworld, the world of Minecraft. Clearly they were concerned if they opened with the extremely uninteresting real world character stuff, children will not be immediately engaged. Because that is what follows: extremely uninteresting real world stuff. Jason Momoa is a washed out… 1980s video game champion (see Pixels)? While young Sebastian Hansen and Emma Myers are siblings with no parents; their mother died but it doesn’t seem that emotionally significant.
Eventually, they all get warped into the Minecraft world. Henry (Hansen) has the creative gene and immediately picks up how everything works; Garrett (Momoa) stumbles around and fails at literally everything. He is constantly antagonistic and claims he knows everything. Is the subtext suggesting Gen-X gamers are unfit in the world of Minecraft? Jack Black plays Steve, iconic character and a human living in The Overworld.
Like The Lego Movie, this movie is riotous. It barely stops for breath, it barely knows how to take a moment for itself. While simultaneously engorged with the game’s iconography, it is also irreverent to it. Creepers are scary, right? Night-time is scary, right? Let’s give almost zero build up or tension to them. Straight into the action! Minecraft is, ultimately, about building, right? Well, there’s very little actual building or even mining. Most of their weapons and gear are already built / built off-screen.
There’s no understating the pace of this film. If you are inclined to ask questions like: Why did that happen? You will need a notebook to watch this movie. The editing and performances are haphazard and wildly cartoonish to a fault. Most of the line reads feel apropos of nothing, everyone is on a green screen. Everyone flies around and crashes into things without injury. The film feels constructed by the video game’s own blocks; interchangeable and empty when examined on their own. There’s a weightlessness to everything, and audiences will become quickly numb to it. Asking questions like: “What is happening with this school principle character subplot??”
Clawing some positivity out of the mire, it does have a very consistent look. The “upscaled” Minecraft designs are sure to make a lot of fans happy. Although one wonders why it isn’t just a cartoon, and not at the mercy of having live action actors in it. There’s a buried theme of creativity being important, and in need of being fostered in the real world, which is noble.
Remembering this film, I feel like I blanked out a couple of times. Such is the speed of it. How did they get there? No time to explain. When the film has an emotional moment for a characters, there’s a character waiting in the wings to say: “Hey! Don’t think about that! Action is over here!” Quite literally.
To close: I didn’t go in wanting to hate it. In fact, I was very sceptical of The Lego Movie. I wanted A Minecraft Movie to convince me. To teach me. But it wasn’t emotionally or thematically driven. It was just a chaos of slapstick comedy and explosions.
(This is a 2/5 purely because I know it isn’t for me)
Additional Marshmallows: No seriously, what was that subplot with the school principle?
Additional, Additional Marshmallows: Why did Dennis the wolf go evil randomly?
Additional, Additional, Additional Marshmallows: The robot with the wings is significant in some way?
Additional, Additional, Additional, Additional Marshmallows: The “orb” is a square. I got it. But why do they also have spherical shaped things like potion bottles and pearls etc?