The Dark Herald Recommends: A Minecraft Movie

It's every bit as good as I thought it would be... *sigh*

I got this one flat out wrong.  I was predicting with total conviction it would do only slightly better than Snow White and that was only because Zegler’s film was going to be a white phosphorus tire fire of a disaster.

Minecraft’s blisteringly bad YouTube ratio on the trailer certainly backed up my opinion.  I absolutely knew it was going to bomb.

Yeah, about that…

A Minecraft Movie is currently sitting on $314 million as of this writing, by the time you read this that number will be hopelessly obsolete.  

Minecraft was always the (pun alert) Little Engine That Could.  It became a monster hit when it was in freaking Alpha back when Notch Persson put it online sixteen years ago. It was retro before retro was cool and the system requirements weren’t even bargain basement. You could run it off of gear that you could probably have found if you dove into the right dumpster. It could run off a 64 bit single core AMD, with 512 Megabytes of RAM and 90 Megabytes for the game files.  Please note I was using the word “Megabytes” not “Gigabytes.”

Its system requirements have come up in the world since then but it has remained the game you let your son play on the computer he found in the attic.

Minecraft is a quite functional sandbox and does what you want it to but it’s also kind of a mess.  From that perspective A Minecraft Movie is a flawless transition to the silver screen.

It knows what its audience wants.  That’s the only thing I can give it but it absolutely knows that. 

The film starts when Steve (a default character in the game) goes into an abandoned mine because no reason and finds his way to the Minecraft overworld.  GEARSHIFT!  Next we meet Jason Momoa’s character Garrett, a completely laughable loser who used to be a video game champion when he was a kid and isn’t a kid anymore.  He bids on storage bins and ends up finding a MacGuffin Cube that will drive the plot for the rest of the movie.

Garrett is framed as the main character, which I suspect he was at one point.  Momoa has the lead billing, although Jack Black is clearly the star of the movie.  I’m pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to be the case, which would explain why a guy with a decent reputation like Momoa was reportedly very surly on the set.

We run into three more characters.  The boy who kind of becomes the main protagonist. His older sister who is his guardian.  A real estate broker because they needed a black woman in this to meet their DEI quota.  In fairness she pulled her weight. Also, the science genius kid was a white boy instead of a black lesbian, that’s different.

The plot, if it can be called that, is that the team of misfits get to the Minecraft Overworld, lose the MacGuffin Cube, run into Jack Black who turns the Jack Black up to eleven, and agrees to help them get it back so they can go home and end the movie.  The witch queen of the Piglins needs the MacGuffin cube to turn the Overworld into eternal night, allowing the Nether’s denizens to take it over.  Will the team of Misfits defeat the…?  Yeah, of course they will. 

Oh, spoiler alert I guess.

None of the characters here have a story arc.  They’re the same cardboard cutouts they were at the start but materially better off. 

This movie was commanded into existence, after Super Mario Brothers blew the doors off. It feels like a cash grab because it is.

I have no doubt the actors were going through the motions but at least they were trying not to make it obvious. There’s only so much energy you can bring to part when you are playing off of green screen.  Momoa and Black did their best by being as frenetic as possible.  I can say I wasn’t bored when they were on the screen and that’s close to being entertained. I will grant that the Minecraft aesthetic was preserved to the extent that it can be.

Was there anything I liked? No.  But there was one thing it did absolutely right: Fan. Service.

Fan service was why this made and that is what it delivers.  Given the vicious contempt most studios have for their franchises’ builtin fan bases these days, this is something of a nice change of pace. Somebody was in charge of delivering only the freshest and tastiest of memberberries, it did and Minecraft kids absolutely loved this movie for it.  That is the audience this movie was made for and they are 100% satisfied by it. 

They were constantly cheering when some favorite thing from the game was on the screen. The kids were already going nuts for “Chicken Jockey!” when I saw it.  By Sunday they were tearing up the theaters.

The one thing that I absolutely have to give this movie is that it knew it’s audience.  This. Is. A. Boys’. Movie.

It’s not meant for grown-ups or truthfully little kids (but they can tolerate it), it’s meant for boys.  That’s the audience. And its audience absolutely loves it.

The Dark Herald Recommends with Reservations (2.7 / 5)

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