A Minecraft Movie

A Minecraft Movie
Starring Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Sebastian Hansen, Emma Myers
Directed by Jared Hess

I've never played Minecraft and I know little about it, so obviously this movie isn't for me (I'm also not a child, which is also the audience the movie goes for), so I already went into the film with very low expectations. I expected a CGI world where block creatures exist and humans find themselves trapped in it looking for a way out, and basically that's what I got. Yet even with my tempered expectations, there wasn't any moments in the movie that made me doubt my...well, doubt...that this could be something spectacular. Maybe I'm just not creative enough to see it.

Steve (Jack Black) was a lonely child who enjoyed building things and wanted to work in the mine, but couldn't because he was still a kid - but when he grew up, he worked in the mine and found two pieces of a glowing puzzle that, when put together, opened a portal to another world that he called the Overworld - and Steve thrived. He learned to build a whole society and even found himself a best friend in a wolf-dog he named Dennis. Life was good until he inadvertently opened another portal to the Netherworld - a dark world occupied by pigs and run by the magical queen Malgosha (Rachel House) who wants to mine the Overworld for its gold. To protect the world, Steve sends the cube to earth where it's found by Garrett "The Garbage Man" Garrison (Jason Momoa) - a loser who still lives in the past when he was a famous video gamer. He meets fellow outcast teen Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and his sister Natalie (Emma Myers) who moved to town after their mother's death, and Henry activates the portal. Together with Dawn (Danielle Brooks) - a real estate agent/zookeeper, the four humans enter the Overworld and join with Steve to save it from Malgosha and her army, and find a way back home.

Again, "A Minecraft Movie" has two strikes against it for me - I never played the game, and I'm not young enough to enjoy the colorful scenery that takes me away from the fact that there's no actual story to be told. While some people can pass it off by saying "it's a movie geared for children," I can retort that with other like-minded movies like "Sonic the Hedgehog" that were also geared for children but had enough depth and story to keep adults entertained as well. This was just a bunch of tired jokes strewn together that failed to land more than succeeded, telling a bare-bones story about believing in yourself and creativity, all shot against a CGI-infused backdrop of colorful characters and landscape.

I may sound bitter toward the film, but that's not my intent. I just didn't enjoy it because I feel it dumbed down any sort of story it was supposed to tell. It seemed Henry was supposed to be the main hero of the story, an outcast kid with a grand imagination who would be perfect for the Overworld, but throughout the movie we don't learn anything about the kid or any inside strength he possesses. His sister Natalie is worse, as she disappears for most of the film and only exists to worry about her brother. Danielle Harris's Dawn is better because she had better comedic timing, but even her character is wasted with a typecast tone.

Jason Momoa and Jack Black were supposed to be the stars of the movie, but even they couldn't hold any storyline. Black's Steve served as the exposition dump narrator for the first twenty minutes or so of the movie (to which I was thankful for, because I'd be totally in the dark otherwise), but his motives in the movie seem confusing, like there was a bunch of story that got edited out that could've made his actions make sense. Same goes for Momoa's Garrett, who comes to the Overworld with desire for riches that makes sense at the start, but then halfway through it kinda gets forgotten before it's remembered again, and then forgotten again afterward. Then he too disappears for a good chunk of the film. It's just weird how these characters came in and out of the movie and had little to no development whatsoever.

It's hard to really decipher the main theme of the movie, apart from embracing your creative side, but even that is lessened with a weak villain with even weaker intentions (essentially it's like "Signs" set to a kid's video game movie, where the baddies can't even go to the Overwatch because they'll die, but eventually they find a way around it). The movie spends too much time in the real world which drags on at a snail's pace because, even though we meet the characters, we know hardly anything about them and don't see any growth or development throughout.

Still, it seems like I'm dumping on this movie, but it had its entertaining value as well. There's a lot of slapstick comedy that I appreciated, and the cast really seemed to be enjoying themselves which helped me feel some sort of enjoyment as well - even if it's lacking any substance or...as the game itself centers around...creativity.

The Score: C