I Cannot Review ‘A Minecraft Movie’
I cannot, in my right mind, give a full review of ‘A Minecraft Movie’.
This thought struck me after I left the theatre, having watched two post-credit scenes, one where Matt Berry voices the love interest Villager to Jennifer Coolidge’s VP, and the other that shows Steve meeting Alex, a cute nod to the alternative Minecraft skin. The thought, however, was about how truly conflicted this film made me as both a film fan, and a minecraft fan.
As a film fan, this film is not good. In fact, it is worse than not good, it is trash. It is a pure one hour and forty minutes of horrific acting, a terribly paced plot, reference making to memes (this does not include the technoblade reference, which I did believe was a sweet inclusion), and grab bag phrases for gen z and gen alpha to repeat over and over on Tiktok. The brother-sister relationship was unbelievably underutilised and felt like it had zero heart within it, and I understand that hating on child acting is a bit of a meme at this point, I really do think Sebastian Hansen could have been directed a lot better. It is its own marketing tool, and it goes against its own core message, being a malformed creation of greed and ‘cash grab’ ideology that Hollywood has fallen into. Even before this film, when the trailers were shown, half of them were remakes of existing titles (Lilo and Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon), showing the ever popular belief that Hollywood doesn't care about children’s cinema, and only wish to create a Cocomelon replacement for a minimum one hour and twenty minute runtime to rake in the most cash possible.
But as a Minecraft fan…I loved it. It was funny, the humor suckerpunched me into genuinely laughing. Jason Momoa provided some of the most genuine joy I have had in a cinema experience in a long time, the ‘Garbage Man’ being such a fantastic comic relief character, and truly is the stand-out of the group. Jack Black as Steve was just ridiculous, but it's almost as if the film knows this. There are three points in this film where Steve just, bursts into song. A genuine one minute scene is dedicated to Steve singing about his ‘lava chicken’ cooking machine. His lines announcing ‘flint and steel’ or ‘slime cube!’ are so out of place and janky, that they loop back around to being endearing and honestly, hilarious. The references to Villager Trading, Creeper Farming, to building Iron Golem armies to fight off a ‘raid’, felt true to the game. There was even one shot during the Chicken Jockey fight that I was genuinely impressed by.
When I got home, and sat down to type out some semblance of a review, I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I felt too conflicted. Yes, this film shows the dystopian downturn of Hollywood’s film philosophy, and that they wish to use the medium like jingling car keys in front of a toddler, instead of telling genuine stories that could enrich the growing youth. But it also knows what it is, a meme movie. An almost two hour, unserious romp, to enjoy with your friends or family, to point out and laugh at its absurdist comedy, to feel genuine nostalgia for the game you grew up with and still play, and in the end, to just have fun. I wrote, and deleted, and wrote again and again a review, but each time I found myself disagreeing with what I put down. Was it good or bad? A one star, or a five star experience. I didn’t know, and I still don’t.
I have settled on the fact that ‘A Minecraft Movie’ just is. A strange anomaly that I cannot place a score on. Something that lives in my heart, and in my mind as I both love it and tear it to shreds, and much like Minecraft as a game, something I will not touch for months, until I get the urge to load it up, and wonder why I ever put it down in the first place.
