Flasz On Film

Initially released in 2011, Minecraft quickly rose in popularity and cultural prominence owing to the simple fact that it allowed players to literally do whatever they wanted. It was a sandbox building and crafting game with a minor survival element. And although it took it a decade to reach the top of the annual sales rankings (boosted additionally by the acquisition of its developer Mojang Studios by Microsoft in 2013), it had become the best-selling video game of all time long before that. It surpassed such long-standing stalwarts as Tetris and The Oregon Trail, and cultural juggernauts like Grand Theft Auto V and Mario Kart 8. 

Therefore, nobody was really surprised when in 2014 Hollywood moguls began conceptualizing the idea of tapping into those Minecraft riches and turning this video game phenom into a movie with a blockbuster potential. But how exactly are you supposed to adapt a sandbox game without canonical lore? No story or even a half-fleshed out linear PvE component. Just a player gathering stuff, making stuff and building stuff using the stuff they made from the stuff they gathered. I suppose this is why it took over a decade for A Minecraft Movie to come together. It was a tall order.  

Not only does a movie based on the best-selling video game of all time need to satisfy the requirements of its devoted fan base, but it also needs to succeed as a movie and last time I checked, unless we’re talking about arthouse cinema where plot is superfluous and tone is king, a movie like this needs to have characters and some kind of a story to keep the experience together and function as entertainment. This is where I think the lessons of the last three decades of mostly unsuccessful video game adaptations truly come in handy because, after installing a revolving door of screenwriters and directors, the production team identified the creative forces behind Nacho Libre and Napoleon Dynamite as the ones to crack the code and figure out how to turn an adaptation of a sandbox brand into something resembling a movie. And the clue is in the title, more specifically in the indefinite article sitting in front of it.  

They realized that to make this project work, and I can only expect the WB bean-counters made it abundantly clear that a movie with a price tag of 150 million dollars must not be a financial disappointment, the movie in question would have to lean in one of two directions and either invent the lore upon which the movie would be resting or disregard this idea completely. They decided to skip the lore and go full Lord and Miller instead. Much like the 2014 The Lego Movie — a cinematic treatment of a brand without a story but built on the joy of creation— A Minecraft Movie became a celebration of what it feels like to be a part of the Minecraft world, as opposed to a story set in its universe. The Lego Movie had his Master Builder stuff and a whole caboodle of nonsense fused together into a narrative that barely made sense otherwise and imbued it with an earworm of a song that drove all the parents privileged enough to sit beside their happy little monkeys during the screening to their absolute limits.  

The story is similar here: Jack Black finds a glowy thingy and a thingy that looks like it should fit the glowy thingy, puts one in the other and opens a portal to a world where everything is cubical and you can build stuff by pointing at space, which is essentially the world of Minecraft. Much like Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception, he builds a lot of stuff in this world and truly lets his creative hog lose, while also seemingly losing his mind. However, this is hard to discern because it is likely that what we observe on the screen is just typical Jack Black behavior rather than a character trait built into the narrative. Nevertheless, the glowy thingy is found later by Jason Momoa in pink. Jason Momoa in pink befriends randomly a new kid in town Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and they together end up transported to the Minecraft world. Henry’s older sister Natalie (Emma Myers) tags along together with an estate agent (Danielle Brooks) and they all now have to first use the glowy thingy, then find a new thingy for the glowy thingy and then finally to face off against a horde of (I don’t know) pork zombie orks called piglins (I really don’t know) who want to take over the world or something. Long story short, the movie doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and that’s me being polite here.  

This is to be expected because its goal is not to add to the Minecraft canon and to build an epic story set in this unique video game universe, but rather to tap into the feel of the game. It’s an attempt at bringing the Minecraft vibes to the screen, which is an assignment Momoa and Black clearly understood from the get-go. They were not making THE Minecraft Movie, but rather A Minecraft Movie, so it was more than acceptable to take a few steps back from the assignment at hand and figure out how to make it fun and where to find the vibes the fans of the game will be able to identify with. Consequently, the movie Jared Hess directed is likely to divide critical opinion or maybe even to become another lightning rod in the culture war between critics and general audiences because it plays as though Adam Sandler directed a remake of Spy Kids rather than a serious piece of large budget four-quadrant entertainment.  

But I can tell you that it works. Now, I wasn’t the target demographic for this movie, I can tell you that much. However, the audience full of kids and adolescents, many of whom intimately familiar with the game, who were hooting and hollering all throughout the movie. And the chicken jockey scene sent them into a nirvana state while I sat there and watched impotently from the sidelines. I did find sanctuary in the sweet and warm embrace of cringe-fest gonzo characterizations and post-Robin Williams performative insanity courtesy of Momoa and Black, so I wasn’t totally on my own. But I can tell you already that if you’re thinking this movie is going to work on the same plane of interpretation as The Super Mario Bros Movie, you are going to be sorely disappointed. This is a live-action interpretative dance on the subject of The Lego Movie rich with performative shenanigans. Two grown-ass men goof in front of a green screen while making fun of themselves and the story itself. This is not the kind of entertainment you’d expect from a more mainstream Pixar or Dreamworks animation. It’s a cult classic in the making made for people who are young enough to use the word “skibidi” in a sentence and not look like Steve Buscemi in a baseball cap backwards.  

You might scoff at this movie or dismiss it as a pile of interminable garbage, but kids love it to the tune of half a billion dollars at the box office and counting. And that’s nothing to sniff at. A Minecraft Movie works for its intended audience of youngsters who have grown up alongside this video game and who are now better primed than anybody to receive the surreal humor this movie delivers in spades. I can only imagine that the generation of blowhard boomers who had grown up during the Summer of Love and then bought all the houses and became conservative as all hell felt similarly about taking their kids to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Super Mario Bros (the original one only a handful of weirdos like Yours Truly feel something towards) back when they were coming to cinemas. They probably felt weird and out of step with the times when they couldn’t connect with the youth of the time who chanted “cowabunga” on the way out of the screening of a movie starring four men in turtle costumes.    

So, yeah. A Minecraft Movie advertises exactly what it does in its title alone. It’s not Minecraft or The Minecraft Movie. It’s titled to make the viewer aware that what they are about to experience is a Minecraft movie, as in a movie that’s weird and gonzo and strange and cringy and surreal and creative all together and all at once. It’s a vibe adaptation of a video game with no story at all that makes a complete mockery of the hero’s journey and feels fake all throughout. And it works, as it turns out. Not exactly my cup of tea, but I can see how my own eleven-year-old will end up re-watching it at home when it’s available. And I can bet you right now that in ten years, twenty-somethings are going to get high on blueberry vapes or whatever will be in vogue then and watch it the way their parents watched Bill and Ted movies or Dude, Where’s My Car.