Warner Brothers A Minecraft Movie
A Movie Review
(It’s weird but I don’t remember seeing the girls on each end in the movie. Oddly enough, though, they’re my daughters. Talk about a photo bomb. Or not, as the case may be.)
Ya know, it’s weird. I had never seen a movie based on a video game I hadn’t played before this past weekend. I mean, I was never the most avid Resident Evil or Tomb Raider fan, but I’ve played both somewhat. I played the original Warcraft games a bit when they first came out and I’m a freaking Wowhead. My World of Warcraft main has something like eighteen months online. That’s not an exaggeration. But this weekend, I went to see A Minecraft Movie with my kids.
It was a pretty cool experience. I’ve been a Jack Black fan since forever so I was happy to see anything with him in it. The rest of the cast was cool, too. There was a real chemistry here. Everyone worked well together and played off of each other in just the right way. But I do have to single one cast member out for special praise.
Jason Momoa was a freaking champion in A Minecraft Movie. Seriously, he was so 1980s wrestler (which was more or less the character he was playing) that I continuously expected him to tell me to snap into a Slim Jim. He played that part to a T. I was in awe of it. Jason Momoa was Garrett like Robert Downey Jr. was Tony Stark.
Although I do have to ask how much sense it makes for Stifler’s Mom to play the principal. Err… That caused a bit of cognitive dissonance for the old Jimbo. I guess I’ve just got Jennifer Coolidge a little too pigeonholed for my own good. She was thoroughly enjoyable and I guess I’ve still got that twenty-six year old crush on her. That made up for my moment of “Wait, wut?” that I had when I saw her up there.
I was a bit concerned that I might have a hard time following A Minecraft Movie because I hadn’t played the game, but that was not a problem in the slightest. I did have a couple of questions for my daughters after the movie regarding crafting tables and chickens, but the plot of the movie made sense the whole way through. I don’t know if the writers included some stuff to fill me in and did it well enough that I missed the fact that they were doing or if I’ve just done enough gaming or if the game is just that simple and easy to follow but it worked.
For the record, assuming I understood the girls correctly, chickens and crafting tables are both very much big things in the Minecraft world. So is lava apparently. And other things that I was unaware of exist there too.
As a fan of Science Fiction or Fantasy though, I expect that. World building is a thing whether I’m watching Star Wars for the first time or reading a new book series or, ya know, whatever. The writer of A Minecraft Movie did not expect any knowledge of the game when they wrote the movie. I had a ton of fun just watching things play out in front of me and had no feeling that I was being patronized or talked down to. I’d tell anyone who was concerned about a lack of knowledge ruining the movie for them to not worry about it. This was an easy movie to love.
The special effects needed to be on point and they were. There were all kinds of builds (I think that’s what they’re called) and creatures (pretty sure that’s not what they’re called) and other stuff and it just looked right. I think it did, anyway. Actually, let me rephrase that: It looked cool. Walking pig people, cartoon style zombies, skeletons, dogs and weird looking villager people all looked the way I expected them to, and looked right when they moved.
There were a couple things that appeared which I believe were homages to other franchises. I don’t want to spoil too much and, not knowing the Minecraft world, there’s a not insignificant chance that they’re part of the milieu and I just don’t know it. All in all though, ignorance is bliss and I found myself smiling while certain things popped up on the movie screen.
The story itself was a good one. When my kids brought up seeing A Minecraft Movie (I had originally contacted them asking about the Looney Tunes movie) I was a bit concerned that we were going to end up watching a two hour game play video. What little I know of Minecraft never struck me as being something that lent itself to a plot line. I’ve seen some videos of impressive builds on Facebook, but that’s all they were; Static constructs that may very well have looked really cool but didn’t DO anything. That’s not a problem here. I have to believe that it’s the addition of the people to the movie that actually made it a story, but it worked. There is a bit of a morality tale here, but it’s not weaponized and it works within the constraints of what the movie actually is.
The one thing I can’t really comment directly on is how faithful A Minecraft Movie is to the game. From what I can tell indirectly though, it seems to have done a pretty good job. My kids were swapping stories about things they had built in the game and how it worked as related to the movie. I don’t think I ever want to be a character in a game my older daughter is playing, she sounds a bit sadistic toward some innocent pixels who have never done anything to deserve that kind of treatment, but it sounded like she had done some of the exact stuff they had done in the movie in the game on an industrialized level. I think. Actually, I don’t want to think. My mama told me that thinkin’ always gets me in trouble. That was the cool thing about this movie. I didn’t have to think for two hours. I could just enjoy.
Bottom Line: 4.75 out of 5 Launched Marshmallows
A Minecraft Movie
Jared Hess
Warner Brothers, 2025
Some Minecraft related items are available for purchase at the following links. If you click a link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.