Director – Jared Hess, Screenplay – Chris Bowman, Chris Galletta, Gavin James, Hubbel Palmer & Neil Widener, Story – Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer & Allison Schroeder, Based on the Minecraft Videogame Created by Mojang Studios, Producers – Jon Berg, Cale Boyter, Yu Bui, Roy Lee, Jill Messick, Jason Momoa, Torfi Franz Olaffson & Mary Parent, Photography – Enrique Chediak, Music – Mark Mothersbaugh, Visual Effects Supervisor – Dan Lemmon, Visual Effects/Animation – Sony Pictures Imageworks (Supervisor – Seth Maury, Animation Supervisors – Richard B. Smith & Derek Tannehill) & Weta FX Ltd (Supervisor – Sheldon Stopsack, Animation Supervisor – Kevin Estey), Visual Effects – Digital Domain (Supervisor – Piotr Kawas, Animation Supervisor – Liz Bernard), Special Effects Supervisor – Brendon Durey, Production Design – Grant Major. Production Company – Vertigo Entertainment/On the Farm/Mojang Studios.
Cast
Jason Momoa (Garrett ‘The Garbage Man’ Garrison), Jack Black (Steve), Sebastian Hansen (Henry), Emma Myers (Natalie), Danielle Brooks (Dawn), Jennifer Coolidge (Vice Principal Marlene), Rachel House (Voice of Malgosha), Jermaine Clement (Daryl/Voice of Bruce), Jared Hess (Voice of Chungus), Hiram Garcia (Clemente Gunchie), Matt Berry (Voice of Nitwit)
Plot
Tired of life as a doorknob salesman, Steve ventures down into a mine where he discovers an orb and a crystal that when combined open a portal to Overworld. In Overworld, everything is made up out of cube-shaped objects. There Steve builds his own house out of blocks. He then opens a portal to The Nether, ruled over by Malgosha and her piglins. Steve is captured by Malgosha but gives the orb to his Overworld dog Dennis to take back to Earth. Some years later, brother and sister Henry and Natalie move to the town of Chuglass, following the death of their parents. At the same time, Garrett ‘The Garbage Man’ Garrison, a former videogame champion who runs the Game Over World videogame store in the town, buys a lot in a storage locker auction that contains a rare videogame in the hope that it can turn his flagging finances around. Henry visits Game Over World and discovers the orb among the junk from the auction lot. When Henry’s homemade rocket causes chaos at school, he calls Garrett and bribes him to be his guardian. Together they piece together the orb and crystal and open the portal to Overworld. They venture through, followed by Natalie and the realtor Dawn. Marvelling over the strange world they have found, they try to find the way back home, but the crystal has been broken. They encounter Steve who takes them on a quest to find an alternate means of opening the portal. At the same time, they are hunted by Malgosha and her piglins who want the orb.
Minecraft (2011) is videogame that was originally created by Markus Persson for the Swedish game company Mojang Studios. In 2014, the rights were bought for Microsoft for the Xbox and from there it has now spread to other platforms. Minecraft is what is called a sandbox game that allows a player to move around the world and create things from buildings to tools using three-dimensional blocks. There is no mission or goal to the game beyond basic survival, but one encounters a variety of creatures that can have threatening effect, although one can also play in creative mode that allows you to focus on building things.
A Minecraft Movie is a film based on Minecraft. It comes from Jared Hess, the director who had a runaway sensation with the indie comedy Napoleon Dynamite (2004) and went on to the likes of Nacho Libre (2006), Gentlemen Broncos (2009), a work about a novice SF writer, Don Verdean (2015) and the heist comedy Masterminds (2015). Hess’s other genre works include the short-lived time travel tv series Making History (2017) and as co-director of the animated film Thelma the Unicorn (2024).
I am not a gamer so only have a passing familiarity with Minecraft. The film however does incorporate many familiar pieces of canon from Minecraft – the default player character Steve, the piglins, The Nether, the creepers and endermen, the villagers, redstones and so on. On screen, this results in a uniquely original Fantasy Otherworld and some great worldbuilding. When Jack Black ventures through to Overworld in the film’s opening scenes, he discovers one built on the principle of bricks thus we encounter block shaped trees, he builds block houses and encounters a variety of block-shaped fauna including sheep, dancing cows and adopts a pet wolf/dog. Throughout we get Otherworld villagers emerged through the portal to this world; assorted examples of brick architecture; the piglins and other of the bizarre local fauna.
Jack Black in Overworld with block-shaped cattle
On the other hand, there is the film surrounding A Minecraft Movie. For a time, it feels like it is Jared Hess making a typical Jared Hess movie filled with eccentric characters – particularly Jennifer Coolidge (who has a running subplot where she goes on a date with one of the villagers) and Hiram Garcia as the oddball teachers at the school and an unrecognisable Jermaine Clement as the storage locker auctioneer who just wants to be friends with Jason Momoa. They feel like they could easily have stepped out of Napoleon Dynamite. Indeed, both Jason Momoa and Jack Black are playing variants on the likeable oddball losers that populate most of Hess’s films.
My main problem, one that becomes apparent from the moment of Jack Black’s narration, is that A Minecraft Movie has been given a pitch that makes it digestible to people in the single digit age group. A quick Google on Minecraft user demographics reveals that the 43% of its users are in the 15–21-year-old age group. Going by the way A Minecraft Movie is pitched, you would almost assume that it has been made with the Under 10s age group in mind.
What we get is a film made in terms of big easy laughs, a variety of mildly dramatic scenes being pursued by some exotic but never even remotely threatening creatures, a splash of cute effects and lots of humour that plays exactly to the fanbase for Jack Black and his typical performances. It has been a long time since I have come across a film that so actively resists any kind of intellectual engagement. It lacks anything that you have to even remotely think about on any level – it is simply a film that wants you to laugh at it and be mildly amused by some of the goofy creations and designs it throws your way.
(l to r) Sebastian Hansen, Jason Momoa and Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks in Overworld
Jack Black does the familiar Jack Black thing he does in just about every performance and gives the film entertaining life. For that matter, it seems like Jason Momoa ends up giving a Jack Black performance too. Momoa has made a career out of playing hyper-masculine roles – Conan the Barbarian, Khal Drogo on Game of Thrones (2011-9), Aquaman and appearances in The Fast and the Furious films. Casting him as the kind of nerdy comically likeable loser that you know has a soft redeemable side – the sort of role that Jack Black used to do in his sleep back in his heyday in the early 2000s – is the kind of career hiccup that can be looked on as an embarrassment. If A Minecraft Movie were to become a series – and it probably will, it is already the second highest grossing videogame adaptation of all time after The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) – and Momoa typecast in this type of role, it feels like it would be a series misstep with zero career prospects beyond it.
