too lazy for letterboxed/my minecraft movie review
[spoilers]
saw minecraft movie tonight and my friends don't want to hear me discuss the merits therein. which is fine. but. i like. to yap. and this is where yapping happens, so I hear.
i like to take movies on their merits. i am fully aware this isn't worth analyzing, but part of this is that I like to figure out where it went wrong so I can be a better writer. this movie does not deserve the amount of thought I am currently giving it.
my thoughts:
tl;dr: movie for kids in a bad way. did feel like how it feels to play minecraft with friends, but ultimately lacked substance. painfully average, as expected. lacked soul. great movie for high/drunk. great drinking game. great background movie. ultimately not worth your money to see in theatres unless you do so with friends or are looking for the social aspect.
✮✮⛤⛤⛤ - 2/5 stars.
casting + characters
I know some people were upset with jack black as steve but I found it generally inoffensive. he is a weird guy with a weird style that I think works to represent a shut-in who plays too much minecraft. i don't know who else would have been casted in the role to fill a similar purpose, and I kind of like the idea of steve being a weird little guy.
i generally liked the main cast, although I found some of the acting on the younger leads (emma myers and sebastian eugene hansen) to have been somewhat rough, but part of that seems to be that they were not given a great script.
characters were neither particularly likeable nor annoying. most felt flat, with the exception of jack black and jason mamoa, who are thoroughly carried by their actors' charisma.
why the gay subplot though? i think i liked it? it was obviously a gay subplot, and they are nanometers from one anothers' lips in the end. i do not see the purpose of it. although. i think i prefer that to some obligatory het romantic subplot that is similarly forced and makes no sense. i think some humor is meant to be derived out of those characters being gay, which I do not like, but I found nothing about their relationship itself particularly mean in the way that other queerbait-as-humor relationships are. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
humor
surprisingly little fat jokes or toilet humor. I was impressed.
this doesn't make up for the fact that it's generally unfunny. felt a lot like clip baiting (jack black actually saying "minecraft" killed me inside) as with the trailers.
ultimately felt like an MCU movie in regard to its humor, although perhaps a bit more comfortable in its own skin. I find a lot of modern superhero movies are embarrassed by the fact that they are comic book movies; the minecraft movie was completely sincere. this did help endear me to it in some ways, admittedly. but hearing jack black utter 'sneak attack' for the umpteenth time was, in fact, not endearing.
plot
glad they didn't go with the cast being stuck in a video game, tron style. kind of liked that the overworld felt like the characters daydreaming. With the theme of the movie being creativity, having an anti-creativity nether was a compelling replacement for the ender dragon, and I find this suitable for an enemy faction. movie's themes fall flat from killing the ultimately sympathetic (if child-killing) villain who became a victim to, idfk capitalism's urge to kill artists or something.
you know when movies kill their villains and it's like. yeah that's horrible and nothing is going to change now. history will repeat and the oppressed are still oppressed.
not a huge fan of that being a message told to children. that it's fine just to push others down and not think about what brought them there. feels lazy and shallow. although idk what I was expecting with a minecraft movie frankly. depth? courage? no, no. absolutely not.
everything in this movie is very flat. makes me sad. i think i've watched too many artsy films recently, and seeing something so soul-crushingly sanitized hurts a little. especially when it's a game as important to the cultural zeitgeist as minecraft, a game I have more than half of my life playing, on which I've met friends and partners, which got me through the pandemic*
*note: I was not a dsmp kid; I simply liked minecraft.
not a fan of the jennifer coolidge x villager subplot. it is dumb and completely irrelevant to the narrative, existing only as something to clip and laugh about. cynical and unfunny. do not like.
art
I'm in the small minority that likes live action characters in the full CGI world. I think that was neat and I think that reflects the experience of playing minecraft with friends.
still, the mob designs are atrocious. I wish they didn't go for that stupid hyper-realistic look. seeing each pore on a villager's face was truly an experience. I think the exceptions are their iron golem, enderman, and creeper designs- which are truer to the game and blockier- and their piglin designs- which are further from the game and gain a sense of personality through their uniqueness. I strongly disliked Steve's wolf's design and most of the monsters for the opposite reasons, in that they neither stayed true to the source material nor added compelling features to their designs.
they DID get the environments right though. seeing someone's forever world laid out on the big screen really captured minecraft's majesty, even if in a limited way. I thought that was fun. I would have liked to see a wider variety of biomes- forests are most commonly used and minecraft has a variety of more iconic and striking scenes. why not make the minecart chase in a lush cave/deep dark? why not make them stay in an ice spike biome outside of the forest with the mansion? lack of creativity and appeal to the lowest common denominator, again as expected.
closing
bad movie that I, again, should not be writing a wall about. this is more for me than anything. if you read this, my apologies. hope you're having a lovely evening, and hope you had just as much fun as I did despite the movie's quality.
ultimately I think I prefer this to the recent FNAF adaptation because it inspired the feeling of minecraft- goofing off with friends, exploring, going on crazy adventures, and being creative in a low-stakes environment. the fnaf movie's deviations from canon made it feel like very generic horror and didn't inspire similar feelings to fnaf. as such, in my ranking of video game adaptations, I do put it above. however, I still hope this does not receive a sequel, even though I know it will. it is such a blatant cash grab.
in a better world, minecraft could have had the craft and quality of something like barbie. barbie was still fundamentally marked by capitalism, but at least it had some soul. "a minecraft movie" (2025) did not have soul, and is not generally worth watching in a theatre. piracy is recommended for this one.
technoblade reference made me smile, still. even if I know it was a shallow reference. and that's how most of this movie felt.
I've seen a number of other folks throwing around Minecraft bingo cards, and so I chose to make my own set of prompts. Bingo cards are very easy to make on the internet, and I feel no need to make mine even slightly fancy. I will be printing it and marking it up.
If interested, here's my list:
main characters get pumped about diamonds
netherite armor
herobrine secret villain
orchestral wet hands
[CHOICE OF 1] wither is final boss OR ender dragon is final boss OR completely original final boss unrelated to minecraft OR warden is final boss
"aw man"
extended montage which includes crafting, mining
youtuber cameo
line that is minecraft parody lyric
vague DSMP reference
technoblade reference
riding pigs
"let's kick it up a notch"
[CHOICE OF 1] only jack black sings for no reason OR it is secretly a musical
mechanics unrelated to minecraft
"that sounded better in my head"
fakeout death and respawn at bed
"it's gonna blow!"
"it's quiet. too quiet."
"is that all you got?"
queerbaiting
reference to farms
"let me get this straight…"
[CHOICE OF 1] plot about being stuck in a video game OR plot about video game corrupting the real world OR plot about multiverse/minecraft is not a video game in minecraft movie
macguffin plot
found family
PVE structure (ancient city, stronghold, end city, bastion, nether fortress, ocean monument, trial chamber)
minecart chase
cute character is evil and scary and huge threat
dramatic speech is interrupted by animal
axolotl/marketable plushie animal as pet
new mob revealed
protagonist hydrates ghast
protagonist messes up nether portal
nether portal is exclusively blue
aether portal reference
crafting an item that doesn't exist in-game
command block and/or creative mode
beacon mentioned or shown
jennifer coolidge implied to have sex or romantic relationship with villager
1 square = 1 point
1 bingo = 3 additional points on top of the 5 squares
don't cheat; that kills the fun. most points without being spoiled wins. randomize your card. this is mine:
