‘A Minecraft Movie’ Review: The Best-Selling Video Game of All Time Becomes Generic Building Blocks in Uninspired Adaptation [C]

The troubled relationship between cinema and video games—namely, the former’s filmic interpretations of the latter—can often be distilled down to an attempt to translate an interactive medium to a purely immersive one. Every video game adaptation is working from a foundation of a property that gives players some semblance of agency, even if they’re ultimately strung along on a linear path for narrative-based games, and working to convert that to the more physically passive experience of watching a movie.

That’s why it’s funny to see a game like Minecraft get the live-action-meets-CGI kids movie treatment. A Minecraft Movie not only has the job of interpreting some idea of what it’s like to play the game, but it also has to transfigure source material defined by player influence and individual subjectiveness. The base game of Minecraft is an open sandbox that encourages players to derive their own sense of enjoyment from a world that doesn’t guide them along any specific bearing. Explore, build, make the game your own: this is the magic equation that has seen the game grow from its initial niche 2009 alpha release to the best-selling video game of all time and merchandising behemoth. 

How the movie approaches this quandary on a formal and structural level is simple and expected: it doesn’t. The best and worst thing you can say about A Minecraft Movie is that it knows exactly what it is, which is a generic studio kids’ movie with a coat of Minecraft-colored paint layered on top of the extremely familiar temperament of what one of those looks like in the year 2025. Big-name stars adorning their dopiest expressions, broad slapstick, internet-trends-as-jokes (yes, there is a joke within the first 60 seconds about children yearning for the mines), a story that mostly serves as an excuse to show off recognizable Minecraft ephemera to the kids that came to see it—there was never a reason to expect that A Minecraft Movie would ever aim much higher than this entrenched standard. Even the film’s title feels acutely aware of its obligatory nature.

Where it looks to incorporate the importance of creativity to the filmic Minecraft experience is in its overarching moral lesson: that your creativity within the world of the game is only the first step. The next is to carry your sense of imagination over into real life, both to make the world a better place and to cultivate an indelible sense of personal fulfillment in the face of entities that would rather you conform to what’s expected of you. That’s a commendable lesson to pass to kids growing up in a world becoming ever more poisoned by AI art and a general societal notion that artistry is expendable and something to be taken for granted. 

The kid experiencing the brunt of these lessons is Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen), an awkward misfit with a burgeoning creative mind, who is suddenly uprooted to the small town of Chuglass with his sister and now-matriarchal figure Natalie (Emma Myers) following the death of their mother. The small-town troubles the two face in the first act have a more sharp sense of humor than is to be found in the remaining runtime, with some laughs that feel befitting of a film coming from Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre director Jared Hess—a jetpack explosion at a potato chip factory and a kid whose dad has apparently claimed that “math has been debunked” feel like snippets from an overall funnier movie that doesn’t have to eventually rely on brand recognition. 

Alas, we have to get there sooner or later, which is where Jason Momoa’s washed-up arcade game world champion, Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, comes in. Perpetually living in his 80s glory days with a shaggy mullet (a pretty shoddy wig on Momoa, it must be noted) and a pink fringed jacket, Garrett is the owner of a ramshackle video game shop that’s fallen on hard times, and is looking for any way to make a quick buck. He doesn’t know it, but the only thing of value he seems to possess it a strange glowing cube he lifted from a storage unit auction, one that Henry suddenly discovers is more than it seems when it accidentally pulls the trio—plus their unwitting realtor friend Dawn (Danielle Brooks)—through a portal to a new world. It’s not long before they meet the device’s original owner, Steve (Jack Black, apparently directed to turn his goofy dad rocker persona up to 1000), who’s been residing in what he calls “The Overworld” for years, most recently trapped by the Piglin witch Malgosha (Rachel House). She’s dispatched Steve to enact her bidding and retrieve the Orb of Dominance now that it’s returned. 

If that all sounds like nonsense, that’s because it’s engineered to speak to Minecraft players above all else, manufacturing a makeshift plot between five screenplay writers and three story writers to get these characters to The Overworld and show off the CG rendering of the game’s blocky, pixelated graphics. The hits are here: sheep, pigs, llamas, villagers, zombies, endermen, skeletons, swords, pickaxes—everything you can experience yourself in the game that you can now watch live-action performers interact with instead of yourself. That stark discrepancy between the soul of the game and the relationship it has with transitioning mediums looms over the entirety of the film, and becomes more pronounced as it visualizes core concepts from the game. Gathering materials is done by simply hitting an object and collecting the small block of supplies left in its wake. Building is done by characters merely throwing the supplies, which often visually reads as actors simply forcefully gesturing towards the ground. Crafting tables are a thing here too, as characters line up supplies on a grid table and smash them together to make something new. It’s all perfectly reflective of the game, which is what can make it that much more alienating as a viewing experience. 

That said, The Overworld is not an altogether unpleasant-looking location to spend a feature-length film absorbing. If nothing else, A Minecraft Movie does a pretty bang-up job of transposing the iconic minimal visual style of the game into a computer-generated world for our characters to interact with. You have the occasional instance of actors looking like they’re standing in front of artificial backdrops, but the environments as a whole are bright and colorful, with the visual team benefiting from the game’s existing interesting characters and locales. It doesn’t all translate, but even then, the film is self-aware enough to mine humor from its own existence. It’s amusing that Jack Black is specifically playing the default character model of the game, complete with the basic blue t-shirt and jeans costuming, and the villagers look more or less horrifying, which is why one of them ends up in the real world in a pointless but kind of funny tertiary plot going on a blind date with Jennifer Coolidge. 

Pointless isn’t a bad word to describe most of A Minecraft Movie, as even within its broad, family-accessible margins, it feels like there’s a real dearth of consequence. The Minecraft-illiterate likely won’t glean anything from this that they haven’t already taken away from any regularly released kids’ programming. Older fans will be split between being happy to see their favorite property given the $150 million blockbuster treatment or unsettled by the desecration of their favorite game. Kids will have a good time recognizing things and laughing at the slapstick while maybe being encouraged that their in-game ingenuity has purposes well-served in the world around them. That may seem like a trifling consolation, but ideally, it would set a precedent for kids’ movies that strive for more than the bare minimum.

Grade: C

Warner Bros will release A Minecraft Movie only in theaters on April 4.