You would have to be living in an actual mine to not have heard about chaotic impact that the video game adaption A Minecraft Movie is having on cinema. Fans of the incredibly popular, open world fantasy game have been showing up at screenings and going absolutely berserk at key moments of the film, acting like a Spanish football announcer calling the portals sequence in Avengers: Endgame. There’s been blizzards of popcorn, screaming, a live chicken involved at one point and even the cops have been involved – but while most of this is occurring in a tongue in cheek attempt to go viral (which is obviously working), for anyone who isn’t aware of Minecraft game’s monstrous success must be utterly bewildered at all the fuss.
Well strap in, because Jared Hess’ A Minecraft Movie has no intention of explaining it to you as it’s far too busy striving to be possibly the weirdest blockbuster of the year – but aside from the deranged viral videos, is it actually any good? It’s time to gather flint and steel and remember to avoid the flying popcorn whenever someone says “Chicken jockey”.
During a breathless prologue that introduces us to Steve – an imaginative young man who wished to become a miner since an early age – we are introduced to the Overworld, a fantastical other dimension where literally everything is made out of easily manipulated blocks and the only thing that can stop you building is the boundaries of your own imagination. Gaining access to the Overworld via a glowing doohickey called the Orb of Dominance (despite being square), Steve finally finds the happiness he’s always dreamed off, but when he gains further access the dark, industrial, neighbouring dimension of the Nether, he stirs ip the ire of a greedy race of pig creatures named the Piglins, who want to move out of their ruined world and drain the Overworld of its near-limitless resources.
What’s this got to do with anything, I hear you ask? Well back in the real world, in the rather eccentric town of Chuglass, Ohio, mourning siblings Natalie and Henry are moving to town after their mother’s death and soon get mixed up with deluded, egotistical, 80s video game champion Garrett Garrison who somehow has accidently gotten hold of the Orb of Dominance. Soon, in true fantasy movie fashion, both Natalie, Henry, Garrett and multitasking realtor slash petting zoo owner, Dawn, find themselves within the Overworld and having to try and catch up on a shitload of dos and don’ts.
But among the endless creativity, random zombie and skeleton attacks, attempting to weather the heat of eating lava chicken and avoiding exploding Creepers, they soon find themselves aiding Steve to save the Overworld from the invading Piglins and their creativity hating leader, Malgosha.
Does any of this make a lick of sense? Not really, but that’s never stopped videogame adaptions before…
So, to push all that viral bullcrap to the side, it seemed that the videogame movie, thanks to adaptions of Sonic, Mario and The Last Of Us, had finally put the genre in a place of good standing, bringing smarts, emotion, fun and, most importantly, respectability to a type of flick that had been rendered laughable by endless Resident Evil sequels. However, A Minecraft Movie is something of different kettle of fish, as it has to adapt a game that’s essentially an open world building game that doesn’t actually need any sort of plot to sustain itself other than raw creativity. Thus Jared Hess, he who crafted the famously awkward comedy stylings of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, has decided to triple down on creating the most obnoxious, baffling and derranged fantasy film of recent times that often feels like the World Of Warcraft adaptation from 2016 has been turned into one long Tenacious D skit.
If you don’t actually know what Minecraft is or why it’s so overwhelmingly popular, good luck because the movie genuinely can’t be fucked to explain it to you via conventional, sensible means; and so those new to this cube-shaped world are going to have to hold on tight while the film piledrives your eyeballs through tables with flashy CGI worlds while expecting you to take in exposition that’s literally being screamed into your face by Jack Black at his most histrionic. If you have no knowledge of Minecraft, chances are this movie will take you back to the dark days of the Super Mario Brothers and Street Fighter movies, which were similarly chaotic and annoying and while fans may be completely gleeful at the countless Easter eggs you are never going to understand, you’ll probably sit there in a fugue state, desperately waiting for it to end.
However, that’s what happens if you take A Minecraft Movie seriously. As someone who is also a little unfamiliar with the game, but who is familiar with Hess’ previous body of work, it soon becomes obvious that the film maybe should be treated as one massive piss-take that’s laughing at itself just as much as you are. It’s a film that’s fully in on the joke that everything that’s occurring is possibly the dumbest thing you’ve ever seen and if you doubt it, just examine the work of its two leads, Jack Black and Jason Momoa. Locked in a jochular battle to the death to see who can deliver the most stupid performance of the decade. Black’s Steve is so overplayed it’s surely supposed to be parody of the man himself, while Momoa fully embraces the toxic masculinity of a man stuck in the 80s as his character is actually based on a real person (famous 80s gamer Billy Mitchell from the documentary King Of Kong) who was also spoofed by Peter Dinklage in 2015s Pixels. Whenever the film is fully focused on either of these two idiots, or even the very Jarad Hess-style weirdness of Chuglass, Ohio, Minecraft proves to be genuine fun, almost in the way that Tommy Wiseu’s The Room is fun, but on purpose as it plumbs the depths of idiocy ever deeper to be as confoundingly strange as humanly possible.
However, whenever the film breaks from this in any attempt to act like a more conventional blockbuster, it tends to struggle and similarly, any acts of genuine earnestness falls flatter than a Witherspoons’ lager, leaving Emma Myers and Sebastian Eugene to bond awkwardly thus taking up precious time from Black extravagantly saying whatever’s in front of him at the time, or having more scenes where Jennifer Coolidge’s recently divorced principle wines and dines one of the mono-browed villagers.
Objectively awful to anyone who requires any sense of order with their movies (The Lego Movie managed to harness endless chaos much better), I still found the fever-dream aesthetic of A Minecraft Movie fascinating to experience. Is it the best-worst movie of the year? Is it a genius parody of blockbuster filmmaking itself? Is it just another video game adaptation that childishly refuses to explain itself to newbies? I honestly don’t know – but what I do know is that at one point, Black and Momoa have to 69 each other while attached to a flying device to escape and explosion. That may not be cinema, but it certainly made me fucking laugh.
Whether you finally decide if it’s awfully fantastic, or fantastically awful, one way or another A Minecraft Movie will knock your block off.
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