’s theatre editor Andrzej Lukowski heads to his local multiplex to get to the bottom of the Minecraft Movie phenomenon
As I write this review of A Minecraft Movie, the discourse around Jared Hess’s big budget big-screen spin-off of the most successful video game in history has palpably shifted.
When the first trailer dropped in September, it became a virtual truism that this thing was going to be horrible: a folly, a flop, an abomination, with the main offender the retina-searingly weird way Hess had used CGI to make a ‘realistic’ looking version of the Minecraft world. The fact that no advanced screenings were laid on for critics only served to confirm its stinker status.
Now, though, quite another story has replaced it: this thing is a stonking great hit, with deliriously fan-serviced audiences so loud and demonstrative that complaints have been made on Mumsnet and special noisy screenings have been laid on to try and contain the madness.
Part of me still wonders if the basic point of what A Minecraft Movie is has still been missed in its abrupt lurch from folly to crowd pleaser. Yes, it pays appropriate tribute to the game, veritably groaning with easter eggs. But at heart what Hess has crafted is a goofy and genuinely quite loveable homage to the ‘80s ‘quest’ movie. Think Willow, think Labyrinth, think The NeverEnding Story, think Legend.
The Minecraft world – in which everything is block shaped, and the sunny, safe days turn into monster-filled night every 10 minutes – is the absurdist backdrop. But essentially A Minecraft Movie is a fond send-up of a genre of film that has only a tangential link to Minecraft. Indeed, if you’d been asked ‘what if the director of Napoleon Dynamite made a fantasy quest movie?’ and nobody had mentioned the ‘M’ word, you’d probably guess at something like this.
Its ‘real world’ setting is Chuglass, a backwater town in Idaho. It is presumably 2025, but Chuglass is strictly analogue, and barely seems to have moved on since 1989, the year Jason Momoa’s second-hand console shop owner Garrett became a tweenage champion at an obscure beat ’em up arcade game.
Now middle-aged and grifting off his smalltown celebrity, Garrett stumbles across a couple of cheerily underexplained McGuffins that permit entrance to the Minecraft world (aka ‘the Overworld’). Accompanied by a handful of Chuglass randoms, Garrett and co freak out at the Overworld’s angular wildlife, attempt to befriend hapless natives the Villagers, and get sucked into an existential battle with the villainous Piglins, who have crossed over from evil sister dimension the Nether. In this endeavour the gang is aided by Jack Black’s Steve, a loner from Chuglass who crossed over on his own years ago and was living his best life in the Overworld until he was captured by said Piglins.
Special noisy screenings have been laid on to contain the madness
Your enjoyment of what comes next will heavily depend upon your tolerance for ironically silly quips and blindingly excessive CGI. There is very little depth to A Minecraft Movie, although there is something quite nice about the bromance that develops between Steve and Garrett, two middle aged men too set in their ways to admit they’re both lonely. It is genuinely pretty funny, both in terms of its general air of loveable weirdness but also some actually good gags (there is a particularly delicious send-up of defeated villain clichés, and a brief but absolutely killer cameo from Matt Berry).
Honestly, it’s pretty good fun, and if it’s kind of a weird place for indie king Hess to have ended up in his middle age, it’s hard to imagine another director tackling this lucrative but thorny IP with such genuine commitment. A sequel is inevitable now, and provided Hess directs it, the Overworld’s in pretty safe hands.
A Minecraft Movie is in cinemas worldwide now.
