A Minecraft Movie: The Definitive Review

Always. Be. Mining.

Being a parent, it’s traditional to endure some school holiday bonanza of overpriced cinema entry and equally overpriced sweets in a kind of autonomic ceremony of getting the kids ‘out of the house’. Naturally, mine chose the latest and greatest assault on their senses, the A Minecraft Movie. Somewhat unsurprising a choice for my two, although one has moved beyond Minecraft and into the hellish quagmire of EA’s FC squad building. Nonetheless, Minecraft remains a source of true endearment for my children and the long-awaited arrival of its movie is a cultural event almost on a par with the arrival of a new Star Wars. Initially lacking in much enthusiasm for the affair, I approached the whole thing thinking mostly about how best to disguise a 90-min TikTok session in a darkened cinema. I was therefore quite pleasantly surprised that I actually enjoyed myself by watching the thing.¹

A Minecraft Movie feels like an incredibly modern product of hyper-optimised inoffensiveness. It’s weirdly, almost freakishly sufficient. There’s certainly an air of caution around it; the fact it’s ‘A’ movie instead of ‘The’, for example. It gently references key aspects of the game while avoiding a full commitment to what Minecraft actually is, and it gently surrounds the core license content with ‘fun movie’ architecture. Jared Hess directing seems to cushion the hardcore game elements in the kind of meandering retro-sedative delights that made Napoleon Dynamite such a gem. Yet it doesn’t quite go the whole hog there, either. Despite this obvious conservatism it’s all pitched with a deft touch and uncanny precision that seems to infuriate critics but delights its target audiences, all while being sufficiently pleasing to the full spectrum of its demographic exploitation bloc, be those rowdy teens or accompanying parents. It’s clearly made for money, yet it doesn’t offend in that regard. It’s just fluffily nice, with just enough sprinkling of Hessian kook and visual splendour. Needless to say, my kids and their friends loved it. They’re already demanding a sequel, which I guess we can presume is inevitable. However it did throw up questions regarding other beloved kid-friendly IPs - Fortnite being an obvious topic, ripe for this kind of license-flexing movie.²

What stood out to me was the restraint. I very much love and admire The Lego Movie, and hence expected the A Minecraft Movie to follow its example of playful intensity and boombastic overload to some extent. And yet, it didn’t. Instead, in scenes where everything could go fully, fully bonkers, we got a smaller and tamer version. Climactic showdowns felt more compact, less grand. Chases felt less fast, less furious. Oddly, the climax felt much less climactic than I was expecting it to be. Even Jack Black felt less Jack Black than I feared. Nothing reached the heights of the first road chase in a The Lego Movie (yes the one where they drive through the house on the back of a lorry), and it never showed any signs of building towards the kind of mindblowing set-pieces that a The Lego Movie excels at. It seems odd, but then perhaps it’s trying to deliberately avoid that sort of creative arms race, or maybe even trying to distance itself from any association with Lego at all. For a movie that happily baits its parental audiences with 80s nostalgia, a mine cart sequence that felt like a clear opportunity to one-up Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom fizzled into being anything but. I was a weird open-goal to miss, unless you consider that perhaps this opening gambit doesn’t want to spend its credit all at once.

To return to that 80s-bait, I was surprised to see a fictional videogame from 1989 was much more authentically 1989 than it probably needed to be. Likewise, the retrogaming shop was stacked with genuine retrogaming goodies. What’s odd was how these weren’t grandstanded or oh-so-nonchalantly dangled as signposted easter eggs. It was just the dude’s shop. This felt a real step removed from Wreck-It Ralph, which had a cloying, saccharine quality of including videogame references because it could, and worst of all, because it could gain cachet by showing them off. It was a worse version of The Last Action Hero’s playful self-references, and they generally offended me on a profound level. There was something so unearned about their inclusion, and something desperate and tokenistic in their sprinkling throughout the film. The retro shop from the A Minecraft Movie, and indeed the entire concept of Garrett himself, felt incredibly conventional. He was present almost as a standard, a new archetype of sorts. As such, his signifiers all felt canonical almost but a sense of genuine affection made them feel distinctly non-token and non-exploitative. And despite the 80s being such over-trodden ground, Garrett didn’t feel tired or over-familiar. More a fun embodiment. Perhaps it was in the deployment being qualitatively better than it ever needed to be, or the fact that maybe, just maybe, Jared Hess had brought some touch of soul to what should ordinarily be a godawful franchise movie that deserves to die a thousand deaths.

Despite that ‘fun movie’ architecture surrounding the Minecraft core, I was left with the opinion that the A Minecraft Movie sits more neatly with the 80s greats of TRON and The Last Starfighter as videogame movies³ that open a new reality for protagonists to explore rather than the decidedly straight adaptations of the 1990s and 2000s. Yes, the Mortal Kombats and Resident Evils and Tomb Raiders. The Uwe Boll opuses and so on. I often reminisce about the pure, synthetic austerity of TRON, how its beauty sung to me anew when it was first released on DVD, and how I recoiled in abject horror at its supposedly superior sequel. This somehow saw fit to naturalise the TRON aesthetic with splendidly incorrect shit like smoke and rain. TRON Ares looks even worse, looking more like it takes place in a Cybergoth wonderland than the abstract realm of raw compute cyberspace. Likewise, there’s something so off-piste and flat-out weird about The Last Starfighter’s CGI being the same ‘in-game’ as it was in-universe as Alex and Grig fight a one-ship war, but in a very real way it’s kind of the point; the CGI is there as both a showcase and a substitute and helps the movie build itself a visual mythology, much as TRON does with its bold, assured and confidently artificial visual style. The A Minecraft Movie slots in so neatly here, to the point where I’m fairly sure you can get shader packs that’ll make the game look very close to the film, and we can be glad that the signature Minecraft aesthetic wasn’t fucked with. And, much like the arbitrary rules of TRON or the videogamey piloting of The Last Starfighter, the world logic of Minecraft under the control of visiting humans is so nicely expressed. There are genuinely fun and pleasing parts in the A Minecraft Movie where human and Minecraft logic combine. These aren’t as clever or dramatic as the real-world intrusions in a The Lego Movie, but at the same time, the A Minecraft Movie doesn’t spoil its dreamworld with an extended leap into the tawdry real world for some moralising story arc the film never really needed. Instead, the A Minecraft Movie guards its integrity with a ‘real’ world that’s as artificial as the Minecraft one, and in doing so never steps beyond its value or outstays its welcome. And while that value may be neat, tidy and conservative, it’s absolutely something worth building on.

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1. It should be disclosed that we saw it at an Everyman cinema, so having a massive seat, plentiful coffees and hot snacks made it remarkably bearable.

2. During furious in-depth discussions, it was established that the best possible Fortnite movie would not involve streamers being sucked into Fortnite world or mere kids being plucked from reality into fantasy. Instead, the demand was for actual spec ops operators to be teleported into the Fortnite melee and trying to fight their way out. This made me wonder where the Call Of Duty movies are?

3. Of course the greatest videogame movie is Night of the Comet. You’ll either know exactly why or you’ll be an uncultured philistine that deserves to live in the cultural gutter. And hey - I’m not crazy. I just don’t give a fuck.