‘A Minecraft Movie’ Review: This Video Game Adaptation Is a Block of Tortured Inspiration

Perhaps the sandboxiest of sandbox games, Minecraft gives users little instruction and certainly no goal at the outset. That’s why, as Steve (Jack Black), the central character of A Minecraft Movie tells us in voiceover, the game’s procedurally generated worlds have become host to millions of stories. For young players especially, it’s a font of creativity, more a platform than a game, more a set of narrative assets than a narrative.

That’s almost certainly the reason that the creators of this film adaptation, written by Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, and Neil Widener, elected to couple the title with the indefinite article at the start, as that “a” signifies the same tip of the hat to subjectivity that revisionist historians make when they call their work “a” history of something. But the film itself proves mostly that this is an evasion of the problem that the very concept of a Minecraft movie is riddled with bugs.

Part of the issue with such an adaptation is the inevitable clash with the precepts of kid-oriented Hollywood, which allows for moments of incoherence but could never embrace the absolute structureless-ness of a game in which most of one’s time is spent calmly hammering at pixelated blocks. No wonder that the ambient, soothing main Minecraft score is only heard twice in A Minecraft Movie, once at the start and once at the end—the only two moments in this manic but rigidly structured film that approach the kind of stasis one often feels playing the game.

In a prologue, we learn the origins of Black’s Steve, a character that’s based on the default Minecraft player avatar but who, in his hyperactive rotundity and graying locks and beard, looks more like the former lead singer of Tenacious D. Steve comes from our reality (or something close to it), but after he uses an MCU Tesseract-like blue cube to open a portal to the Overworld of Minecraft, he makes his home in that more pliable, cuboid realm.

When Steve is captured by Malgosha (voice by Rachel House), the evil matriarch of the barbarous piglin people of the Nether realm, he sends his trusty dog Dennis back to Earth bearing the cube. This soon comes into the hands of Garret (Jason Momoa) of Chuglass, Idaho, who’s locally famous for winning a video game tournament in 1989 but has fallen on hard times. Because Garret has caught the interest of slightly nerdy teen Henry (Sebastian Hansen), who’s recently moved to town with his older sister Natalie (Emma Myers), the three of them are soon transported, Jumanji-style, into the video game-ish reality of the Overworld. Oh, and an eccentric local real estate agent named Dawn (Danielle Brooks) also ends up along for the ride.

Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess brings his hyperbolic spin on small-town weirdness to the depiction of Chuglass, which is full of people defined by their short shorts, outmoded hair styles, and hyperinflated provincial egos. It’s hard not to be tickled by a school vice principal played by Jennifer Coolidge who shares far too much of her personal life with everyone she meets or by the all-purpose teacher Mr. Gunchie (Hiram Garcia), whose tacky hair and dead affect makes him look like he just stepped out of Beavis and Butthead episode.

Offering less charm is the Overworld of Minecraft itself, a place that will surely be bewildering to anyone who hasn’t at least spent significant time observing their children play the game. Here, destroying the blocks that make up reality turns them into smaller blocks that can be re-placed in full size wherever one likes with the thrust of an arm. The only native denizens are peculiarly dim-witted animals (sheep, lamas, and above all chickens) and humanoid villagers who can only express themselves with disgruntled-sounding moans, and at night, a truly random assortment of monsters hunt whatever human creatures appear.

The film’s production design retains the game’s cuboid aesthetic but eschews the 8-bit, pixelated look. There’s a self-reflexivity to the game’s artifact-y textures, to its Windows-style interfaces, that’s lost in this film adaptation, where the finely detailed look of just about everything says nothing in itself about the endless possibilities of a digital world’s malleability.

Sure, plenty of what the characters encounter is derived from the elements of the game that give players such a strong sense of agency. While running from bow-and-arrow-armed skeletons, Garret falls into a randomly generated hole and has to dig himself out. Confronted by an army of groaning zombies, Henry quickly builds a protective tower for himself, Natalie, and Dawn. When they find Steve and learn that they need to defeat Malgosh before she gets her hands on the Tesseract-like magical cube, they explore the stashes of goods that he’s collected, encounter the mineshafts that he’s dug and barely remembers, and have to best some Hollywood-enhanced versions of the dungeons that the game generates for its players to explore.

But in this big-budget film adaptation, all of these references feels so, well, programmatic, particularly as the breakneck quest hits most of the familiar beats of a Star Wars-ian hero’s journey, positioning Henry as the apprentice who comes into his own, though Black and Mamoa (playing, respectively, the Obi-Wan and Han Solo archetypes) get more of the spotlight. A spectacular confrontation between the piglins and whatever forces the quintet can muster from their accumulated Minecraft skills is the inevitable end point, a climax spiced up in uninspired fashion with the arbitrary magical crafts of the game.

One charge you could levy at games that emphasize survival, “farming,” and crafting is that they recapitulate a reality driven by work. Some might argue that spending hours harvesting digital resources is labor rather than play. A Minecraft Movie, though, shows that, perhaps more often than virtual farming, watching Hollywood cash grabs can be a real chore.