“A Minecraft Movie” is not really about “Minecraft.”
Sure, it has the characters, but does it really get at what makes the game great? Sadly it doesn’t, but that doesn’t seem to be director Jard Hess’s goal.
The characters are extremely flat, with only surface level quirk, and only made to deliver jokes as quickly as possible. However, these shortcomings make a lot of sense when looking at the most notable previous work of Hess: “Napoleon Dynamite.”
That movie shows the same prizing of quirk and quick jokes over development of story or character. It feels as though Hess doesn’t care about “Minecraft” the game, but rather his own familiar directorial sensibility.
However “Napoleon Dynamite” wasn’t alone in its era; the 2000s were filled with comedies of the same type. It shares the same sensibility of works by Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler or Judd Apatow.
Though Hess is in no way creating an outdated film, as this dated style adds to the nostalgia. Both “Minecraft” and these films are defining pieces of entertainment for the ideal audience of this movie. It’s also important to note that these 2000s movies aren’t entirely irrelevant to teens; Apatow’s “Superbad” is a Gen Z favorite and Sandler is still a relevant style icon.
It would have been better if Hess could confront its viewers with a movie about what makes “Minecraft” so compelling even after 15 years, or he could have taken a route more akin to the mysterious poem at the end of the game instead of swaddling viewers in nostalgia. It was definitely hilarious and was quotable just as those 2000s’ comedies are, so it achieved what it set out to do.
Jason Momoa was sublimely hilarious. Jack Black is a veteran of the 2000s’ comedy, and he does swimmingly with Momoa, but it feels like he’s playing a caricature of himself, in the same way that Jim Carrey seemed to play a caricature of himself in the recent Sonic film.
The rest of the cast is adept, though not compelling enough to pull any pathos from the material.
The movie is worth seeing, but expect a safe dabbling in Gen Z nostalgia rather than a movie actually about “Minecraft.”
