AmazingShivam_64. That’s what I called myself on Minecraft. A game I played so much to the point where I’d even do little YouTube videos and spend many weekends relentlessly engaged in its assortment of servers. Hours and hours and hours spent to the extent that my parents had to pull me away from the computer. Hell, I even remember the date I got Minecraft (April 5th, 2012). It’s a video game that’s lasted much longer than I expected. Not only playing, but watching others play it too. SkyDoesMinecraft, CaptainSparklez, DanTDM, and The Yogscast would endlessly echo around my room. That’s why A Minecraft Movie hits differently—it feels like someone repackaged a personal memory for mass consumption.
Time spent immersed in the world was not just playing the game, but also the slew of song parodies, sketches, and animations. Looking back, Minecraft was a game that inspired a lot of genuine creativity. I would marvel at what people would come up with: incredible structures, redstone contraptions, fun minigames on servers, and various challenges people would set themselves. Being on Skype calls with friends the whole weekend on SkyWars and Hunger Games was just nonstop fun. Video games were always painted as a mindless waste of time, but you never felt that when playing Minecraft; it was so easy to get lost in the vast collection of block biomes. Sometimes I never wanted to leave it.
The Early Years and a Return During Lockdown
It was a serious thing to us back then, getting into real fights over imaginary items, your friend storming over to your actual house because you stole their diamonds, and crying because you lost one of your creative worlds. Then the house you spent hours building is gone forever. It was really that deep back then; if you weren’t playing Minecraft, you were missing out. Seriously. I mean, who wouldn’t choose to play in a beautiful, pixelly sandbox of endless creativity? I didn’t play as much after the age of 15, as I got more into playing sports, writing, and most importantly, watching films, so something like Minecraft fell to the wayside.
In 2020, during COVID, I found myself drawn to the game again. It was fantastic, running around and building and hearing the ever peaceful score from C418. Minecraft was a great creative outlet, it was relaxing to be in the world of blocks once again. It looked like everyone else had the same idea. The next thing I knew, it was like the old days again.
Playing Minecraft all day, deep into the night, building and fighting across the virtual plane with friends old and new. It was a blast, a real blast, to get back and make things, houses, rollercoasters, and random buildings. The possibilities really felt endless, and I’d argue they still are when it comes to Minecraft. As a child, I was always excited at the prospect of a film about Minecraft, I mean, there is just so much to draw from, and as always, the possibilities were endless.
The Film We’ve Been Waiting For (Sort Of)
That thirst for Minecraft media was always quenched by the seemingly infinite amount of videos on YouTube, but everyone knew sooner or later, there would be a “Minecraft” film. Little did I know, this was something in development since 2014 with many failed attempts to get something off the ground and into production, situated in the mire of development limbo. In 2023, casting news started to trickle out, and it looked like something was really going to happen. From the jump, I suspected that this probably wouldn’t be very good.
Awful trailers, negative reviews, and an onslaught of videos showing young people making cinema workers’ lives hell later confirmed my premonition. I had no plans to see Jared Hess’ “A Minecraft Movie” and yet on the 12th April at Vue Cinemas in Leicester Square, during a bright and sunny afternoon, I found myself sitting with my friend, bracing myself for what was to come. We went solely due to one reason that can be simply summed up in one word: zeitgeist.
This film is more than a film, it’s a cultural moment. Minecraft is arguably the biggest game ever, and there was no doubt this would be huge. To skip this would be to skip a big defining part of pop culture: the 2010s and the 2020s. But more importantly, it was a huge part of my childhood. Going into the film, I more or less knew everything that was to happen. I sat there in the dark cinema, knowing what I would be watching wouldn’t be good. And yet here I was…. But why? I asked myself on the walk home. Why did we go see it?
Curiosity and Cultural Obligation
Frankly, much like the film’s very existence, me watching it was always going to be inevitable regardless of the film’s quality. My curiosity got the best of me. The film is bad, but the question in my head that haunted me was “just how bad is it?”. After all, look how much fun everyone seems to be having, yelling “I am Steve”, “Flint and Steel”, and of course “Chicken Jockey”.
This was the zeitgeist, and as Herzog said “The artist must not avert his eyes” (during an interview with Conan O’Brien apropos watching works of the moment, like trashy television and WWE) and much like driving by a car crash, the impulse to look out of sheer curiosity gets the better of you. There are certain big blockbusters I actively don’t go see as I’ve seen enough of them to know better. I skipped “Deadpool and Wolverine” because I was exhausted by the genre and found myself tired by the mere sight of the trailer anytime I was made to see it. Yet with Minecraft, this odd curiosity just wouldn’t go away.
I wanted to once again witness the cultural moment that was Minecraft. This time, however, the cultural moment transcended the internet and video games and instead showed up in the form of something else. It showed up as the very thing that made me move away from gaming, it showed up as my passion and career in cinema. I can’t lie, a small part of me wanted to see what that experience would be like, raving mad fans screaming at the top of their lungs. However, I never expected it to be such a miserable one.
From Hope to Horror: A Film Fails the Game
I think “A Minecraft Movie” is truly a dreadful piece of blockbuster filmmaking, and I’d go as far as to say it encapsulates everything I hate about modern blockbusters. Take away the IP and big budget nature of it all, and on paper, the concept of a Jared Hess film starring Jason Mamoa, Jennifer Coolidge (fresh from her Emmy wins for “White Lotus”), Oscar Nominee Danielle Brooks, upcoming talent Emma Myers, and Jack Black sounds fantastic.
There’s a sure-fire win right there, but hold on. It’s not a quirky comedic romp, it’s a hundred-million-dollar franchise based on an existing IP that Warner Bros. has been trying to mine for nearly ten years and has five different writers. Interest starts to vanish very fast, and you realise you’re watching a focus group, committee-made, corporate-mandated product. Many on the internet describe modern IP-based filmmaking as the “slop factory” where studios send an interesting voice.
I’ll give Hess this: you can certainly feel in the scenes that don’t take place in the Minecraft world, Hess is really doing his best to make it feel like a Jared Hess film. To make the scenes in the real world feel like something from a real film with a real voice, before both the characters and audience are dragged into a dreadfully garish CGI world for the rest of the film. I’d argue he almost had me fooled, the shot composition and quirky small town setting certainly hoodwinked us for a moment, but really it’s not the same.
The Visual and Creative Decay
These elements are by far the best parts of the film, but even then, this feels like someone trying to imitate Hess as opposed to Hess himself, an artifice in mimicry that is trumped by the ultra-CGI machine that this very attempt of actual film style itself is rendered a whisper. The lights are on, but nobody’s home. However, once you leave the real world and enter the digital purgatory that is the film’s depiction of Minecraft, you crave so badly to go back to the real world, even if it had the same visual quality as a Doritos commercial.
The visuals for most of the film don’t come close to the uncanny valley. Because IT IS the uncanny valley. Where everything is over-lit to death. There’s no real contrast or shadows. We can see real people, but it doesn’t feel real, it doesn’t feel tangible, nothing does. Cheap illusions can’t make up for the lack of magic. The art style is pretty bad; this hyperreal but still animated look that has taken over live-action remakes started by Disney has seeped into “A Minecraft Movie” to its detriment. The literal valleys, landscapes, and creatures feel uncanny. It feels so similar to the game, but also somewhat like the real world. It exists in a sickly non-committal middle ground, producing arguably the worst-looking film I’ve seen. Everything is over-lit to hell, except for, funnily enough, the Nether, aka hell, which has a little contrast but still is a horrendous eyesore.
An IP-Driven Shell With Nothing Inside
There’s something so deeply insulting about a video game adaptation of Minecraft feeling so trite, a game with a multitude of possibilities for adventure, story, and creativity, boiled down to a story I’ve seen countless times done much better. The plot of the film is more or less the same as every 80s kids adventure film (“Jumanji”): “characters get trapped into a magical world, meet someone from their world that is thriving and surviving in this new place they’ve stumbled into and thus they team up to defeat a baddie”.
I’ve heard the phrase “AI-generated” thrown around. Frankly, this is an accurate statement. If you had told an AI to round up ’80s kids’ films and create a movie about Minecraft, this is what you’d get. Somehow, even Gen-Z can’t escape the insufferable 80s nostalgia held by Gen-X, as it seems to be even poisoning the films based on things that WE enjoyed in our childhood.
The film is filled to the brim with characters so paper-thin that calling them generic would be a compliment, dialogue so bad with a collection of Gen-Z terms and painfully obvious references that caused the surrounding audience of young kids to erupt into a frenzy. This, for me, was painful, death by a thousand bad one-liners, so to speak. There was a genuine point that I think I reached my breaking point, I did something I never imagined I would do. I’ve been to the cinema a lot in my life so far, never have I genuinely exclaimed aloud in pure vile disbelief at what I was watching, and yet that changed. I was just outright bewildered, I didn’t even realise I had just audibly exclaimed my anger.
Cultural Tragedy and Corporate Control
The culprit behind this is the moment where General Chungus exclaims to Steve (Jack Black), “I’m going to unalive you”. That was it for me. Earlier, I mentioned how the film has a pretty good cast. To nobody’s surprise, everyone is pretty bad in this. I’d say Jason Momoa comes out fairly strong, however, as he’s pretty engaging to watch. Emma Myers and Danielle Brooks have nothing to do, and Jennifer Coolidge is fun in her two minutes of screen time. However, Jack Black gives perhaps one of my least favourite performances put to film.
It’s not a new statement to say that he’s been doing the same schtick for the last few years, and at the current time, is a better voice actor than he is a live-action performer. But good god, is he beyond insufferable in this role as the famous Minecraft icon “Steve” that trying to intellectualise this aspect feels pointless. He’s grating and unrelentingly annoying, and to think that this man used to work with Richard Linklater! Between this and the cruel disbandment of Tenacious D over a small joke, Jack Black has destroyed any goodwill I once had for him. Every time he opened his mouth to belt a horrendous tune, my eyes would roll so hard it hurt. It’s as if time slowed down anytime he was doing his schtick, the cinema exit calling to me every time he’d screech a line out.
The Tragedy of Minecraft’s Film Adaptation
Minecraft holds a dear place in my heart. It encourages unique problem solving, creativity, and is a fantastic game for all ages. It’s great for kids and doesn’t treat them like morons. It respects those who engage with it. It rewards creativity; you can do and create anything you feel. That this film is so creatively bankrupt is deeply ironic. When people so readily eat it up pains me more. The capitalist film machine has wrapped its arm around the joyous experience of Minecraft and suffocated the magic out of it—‘but it’s okay, we hired a real artist to do it.’ He directed “Napoleon Dynamite” after all!
The sad part is that, for filmmakers like Hess, this is almost the only way he can fund his next project and work with big names. The only way fantastic filmmakers can get anything seen is by giving in to corporate overlords and making a one for them in hopes they might generate just enough studio and investor goodwill for an actual film to get greenlit with 1/10th the budget of the blockbuster they just made. So they can make something with a bit of meaning and substance to it, with real sets and real conflict.
Either that or they turn into a cog in the meat grinder that is corporate blockbusters, making sure studio-mandated notes and four quadrants are hit to ensure each film creates shareholder value. Perhaps the only way John Waters and Todd Solondz get their next films made is by directing a Roblox or Fortnite film first. Perhaps we can get Mike Leigh or Jim Jarmusch to direct The Sims.
The Collapse of Directorial Voice
At its best, the film is poorly recycling Hess’ iconography and directorial trademarks, and at its worst, it’s a film that is the epitome of bad blockbuster filmmaking. Recycled cliches cobbled together with the narrative scraps of films that Gen-X are nostalgic for in a screenplay that treats its audience like morons and lacks any creativity.
Paired with a talented cast given nothing of substance to work with and a once great director yielding to the corporate machine to create a noxious experience that will only really generate memes, garish imagery, and shareholder value. However, the joke is on me. I fell for it. I decided to get out of my car and walk up to the car crash. I’ve only myself to blame for my disappointment, surely, like I said, I knew this would be the case. I’m just shocked that it was this miserable. All in the name of the zeitgeist.
This is what blockbuster filmmaking has become, churning out creatively bankrupt IP pieces to add to a miserable zeitgeist where the new currency is memes and TikTok. Children throw popcorn across the cinema while screaming “Chicken Jockey,” as the staff sit in disbelief at the mess to clean. The imagery of popcorn and nachos flying through the air only translates to dollar signs in the minds of the executives rubbing their hands with delight as they greenlight a sequel. To top this miserable experience off, on the train ride home, I listened to the original soundtrack from C418, and it’s still beautiful. As I got home, I decided to reinstall the game. Sure, the film was awful, but the game surely is still great. However, I was unable to play it, due to Microsoft further integrating its service into Minecraft.
A Poetic End to a Soulless Experience
Microsoft’s corporate consolidation meant that it would delete your old account if you didn’t merge it by a certain date. Sadly, I’m one of the sorry folks who didn’t know this. AmazingShivam_64 quietly vanished unbeknownst to me. A rather poetic ending to the whole experience. I guess I’ll see you all in a couple of years in the sequel directed by Jeremy Saulnier. When Jason Momoa says “creeper, aww man”, the dopamine will rush to our heads as we frantically film each other shouting and screaming in ecstasy while we dump popcorn onto the ground for an underpaid cinema attendant to clean up later.
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