Review Roundup: Jared Hess’ A Minecraft Movie
Even if you’ve never actually played Minecraft — raises hand — it’s impossible to deny its cultural impact. The video game, in which players interact with a massive low-resolution world to craft items, build elaborate structures, and fight various monsters, and raise chickens (among other things), has been a hit since its release in 2011. It’s been praised for its open world creativity and educational applications while spawning a virtual cottage industry of influencers, tutorials, and livestreams.
As such, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood came a-knockin’. Plans for a Minecraft movie began in 2014, with Rob McElhenney (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) tapped to direct and Steve Carell lending his voice. That particular version stalled, and the movie subsequently passed from one team to the next before Jared Hess (Nacho Libre, Napoleon Dynamite) finally sat down in the director’s chair.
The final film stars Jason Momoa and Jack Black, along with appearances from Matt Berry, Kate McKinnon, and Jemaine Clement, and follows a group of misfits who inexplicably find themselves in the bizarre world of Minecraft, where they must use their creativity to survive and return to the real world. So does Hess’ film do justice to the game’s creativity, or does it land on the heap alongside other failed video game adaptations? Read on for a selection of critics’ reactions to the film.
Some of this is amusing, but like the rest of A Minecraft Movie it never feels like it matters. Yet it’s no insult to say that, in this case, that may be more true than not to the spirit of a video game that turns life into a blockhead version of itself.
Tinkering with the game’s countless configurations, building surprising things born of complex emotions and daydreams while keeping savvy gamers on their toes (and, yes, driving home its themes of creativity) would freshen up the increasingly stale videogame genre but good. Predictably, this iteration of Minecraft instead plays it safe, constructing plot conveniences instead of digging for inspiration, reaching for half-assed emotional sentiment that drains the film of any anarchic fun.
There’s a through line, buried in here somewhere, about how it’s harder to be creative, easier to destroy. Unfortunately, A Minecraft Movie proves its own point. Creativity took too much effort. Easier to destroy the spirit of the video game instead.
A Minecraft Movie doesn’t explore the relationship between player and game in an earnest way, like The Lego Movie. It also doesn’t recap or adapt tales from the franchise, like the Sonic the Hedgehog movie franchise. Instead, Hess and the five-person writing team try to make it into a tribute to the general concept of Minecraft, and the general concept of creativity. Both Steve and Henry find the Overworld to be a respite from the real world, where Henry in particular finds that no one believes in or respects his desire to build things. But that message is so slight that it doesn’t really land.
It’s been a few years since Black was at the center of a movie like this — while he’s hardly been gone from the public spotlight, his focus has been largely in voice work and supporting roles — and Minecraft lets him unleash his inner big kid in ways that inspire fond memories of his younger, pre-magnificient-salt-and-pepper-beard days. (He sings no fewer than four songs over the course of the movie, too.)
It’s called A Minecraft Movie instead of The Minecraft Movie to pay tribute to the game’s possibilities, with every player creating a unique experience. The movie does not have that luxury; it is the same for every viewer. But its appreciation for the endless potential of imagination should be more likely to inspire viewers to try to play the game or even create their own.
A Minecraft Movie could have simply been driven by its mammoth video game origins, content to drop in-jokes and references inscrutable to those who haven’t dived into playing Minecraft and delightful to those who have. That would have been the safe route — and it’s one that most IP adaptations are OK with taking — but oddly, Warner Bros. and game studio Mojang appear to be fine with Hess putting his own quirky stamp on this universe.
[T]his Minecraft Movie doesn’t tap into a vein of imagination. Instead, it resembles someone’s first in-game creation: Dime-a-dozen parts, flavored with personal eccentricities, assembled with a child’s disregard. From these ingredients springs a movie that’s both annoyingly predictable and perhaps the most erratic live-action video game adaptation since the original Super Mario Bros. film went to Dinohattan.
Constructed to satisfy tween fans of the franchise and to leave everyone else hanging on for dear life (and shaking their heads in exasperation) as it barrels from one nonsensical and inconsequential plot point to another, this fantasy epic melds live-action and CGI animation for a tale whose guiding purpose is to help extend Mojang Studios’ lucrative brand — and, also, to provide Jack Black and Jason Momoa with ceaseless opportunities for mugging. Block-headed from start to finish, it’s cinema in service of nothing more than IP exploitation.
Things go downhill fast once our grab bag of heroes are transported via portal to The Overworld. The film’s rendition of Minecraft’s grassy cube plains is aesthetically unpleasant, flocked and fuzzy, less resembling the original game and more an uninspired, garishly oversaturated texture pack.
A Minecraft Movie arrives in theaters on April 4, 2025. Watch the latest trailer below.
