A Minecraft Movie Review: Hess Falls Short with Corporate Greed

Jared Hess stole my heart as a child with his cult classic Napoleon Dynamite (2004). To this day, I am a huge fan of that film for not just the nostalgia it brings, but for the unique cast of characters and the absurd world in which they inhabit. It’s a film that doesn’t waste time and leans into its awkward pacing with almost sketch-like scenes. This was over a decade ago; lots can change, and unfortunately, this is about a fall from grace.

            I grew up playing Minecraft, I have a lot of fond memories of playing it with friends, alone, to distract myself. I recall spending countless hours in front of the family computer, hogging it all to myself so I could build shitty houses out of dirt blocks to hide from zombies and creepers. The nostalgia is strong with this game, and for that reason, I can’t blame the Hollywood executives who greenlit this adaptation. The video game to film pipeline has been booming over the last five years or so, and it seemed like a sure thing, which it has proved to be.

            Hess’s semi-live-action film adaptation of the famous game is not a letdown. It is a recurring event of corporate greed dominating creativity. Which is pretty ironic given the game’s structure. As of writing this, the movie has raked in close to seven and a half million dollars worldwide. This is no small feat; they clearly sat the marketing team down and had them study the success of the previous attempts and copied and pasted. They literally pulled Jack Black for the titular lead of ‘Steve’, for the Lord’s sake. And this brings us back to Jared Hess. While his name is on the poster and is being followed around for the film’s success, after actually watching the thing, I am more than confident he had very little to do with any creative decision-making.

The story of A Minecraft Movie is a bare-bones version of Dynamite with bloated animated action scenes to fill in the time. A young boy and his older sister, alone from proper adult guidance, move to a new town, and quickly, the young boy finds himself an outcast amongst his peers and even teachers. He befriends a loser manchild played by Jason Momoa, and the pair find themselves whisked away to the blocky Minecraft world with the sister and a token black lady. Seriously, both of the lead female roles are used exclusively for reaction shots, they hardly even get any lines that establish any level of character. I don’t feel that this was done intentionally, but it is highly noticeable. Once they’ve entered the new realm, they are immediately greeted with the average newbie experience when playing the video game: running around, hitting trees, and hiding from mobs at nighttime. Once Jack Black’s ‘Steve’ is introduced, the story finally starts moving with a bit of momentum.

            This begins my first major gripe with the film: its pacing. It is designed from the ground up like a series of TikToks, as though they intended for snippets to blow up in that format rather than prioritizing a coherent film structure. The front end of the film drags painfully slow, and the low-hanging fruit childish bits only make it go by slower. But, as mentioned, once Jack Black shows up, the show does start to pick up the pace. This is where the TikToks begin and don’t stop until the fucking credits are done. Multiple different songs and dance sequences, cringey one-liners, and childish yelps and screams at every single new creature and event. As previously mentioned, the female characters receive all of the reactions and none of the lines. On the contrary, the young boy played by Sebastian Hansen is directed most of the thematic change and character arc, alongside Jason Momoa’s character. I’m not going to call this sexist or anything like that, but it’s definitely a clearly overlooked aspect of a family film that has been designed for children in the modern age.

            The pacing takes a couple of other weird, oddly chosen directions as well. There’s a particular subplot involving Jennifer Coolidge as the young boy’s new school principal and a Minecraft villager who accidentally travels to the ‘real’ world. This completely unnecessary arc adds a good fifteen to twenty minutes to the film and does nothing but pad the already painful runtime. The numerous action scenes also go on for way too long and refuse to let up. It’s like when Norm Macdonald used to stare into the camera after a joke on Weekend Update, a painful stare into the camera, but instead of an actually good joke, it’s just Jack Black and company screaming as animated ghouls cast fireballs and whatnot. If the film were sub ninety minutes instead of almost breaching two hours, I think it would have accomplished everything it needed to and with much more grace and respect for a wider audience.

What does A Minecraft Movie accomplish? I can’t deny the impact that it has had on the Hollywood industry as a whole over the last few weeks; this has been a very welcome injection of excitement and enthusiasm for getting people back into the movie theaters. There have been a few movies that have done similar efforts, but not to the cultural impact that Hess’s latest effort has had. The “Chicken Jockey” meme alone has not only dominated social media promotions for the film but has simultaneously ruined movie theaters around the country. Is this a good thing or a bad thing for cinemas? On one hand, you have large influxes of new individuals coming to the movies, and on the other hand, they’re scaring away a lot of average movie-goers who have no concept of meme culture. There doesn’t seem to be a definitive answer to this at the moment. I’d like to consider that this is a moment in time for cinema, and the moment is going to pass very soon. Will the effects of A Minecraft Movie remain, or was this all just a fad?

            What could’ve been a wholesome return to form for Jared Hess in a new field of context instead turned into a corporate greed trash bag of intentionally TikTok-cut bits of underwhelming childish comedy. The kind words for this effort end at the impact on Hollywood, and despite my beef with the writing and direction here, I genuinely do hope the effects last for perhaps a better executed indie film, or even a big budget film that somewhat attempts to be even the slightest bit original, source material or no.