Minecraft feels like the opposite of everything that Shrek became–instead of a tongue-in-cheek movie with silly jokes harvested from pop culture which spawned a meme subculture all its own (Shrek upon rewatching are almost indecipherable without the contemporary background knowledge), Minecraft feels like a movie wholly formed from a decade of memes planted for the express purpose of being quoted and memed into an endless mise-en-abîme of internal references. It’s pretty weird when you’re sitting in a theater not 48 hours since the first showing of a movie and already every person under 15 is quoting out loud lines from the movie (“I–am–Steve!”) followed by raucous applause for what I guess is, like, crafting? Like, what the fuck is that?
A lot of the opening business of this movie is mostly jokes that are designed to feed the soul of the parents sitting with their kids: Jason Momoa so stuck in the past that his storyline feels like a flashback until we switch perspectives to a different set of characters in town who are using cell phones and talking about the internet; Jennifer Coolidge doing her best “this is fine” impression as vice principal of the public school Henry attends. Actually, a lot of the best humor is the mean jokes generated by Momoa and aimed at him. He’s clearly doing an impression of Jack Black for the entire movie, while Jack Black has not been instructed to act at all, though I read somewhere that he got kind of in the weeds to prepare for the role (I also read that he was originally cast as a talking pig?) The joke structure of the whole film kind of relies on the fact that different parties in the movie are living in different genres of movie altogether: like, Steve and GarGar are in an action movie and Natalie and Dawn are reacting as if it’s really occurring, while Rachel House’s Malgosha (from the beloved indie Hunter for the Wilderpeople) is competently playing along with Steve’s worldview and Jennifer Coolidge just desperately wants to get laid.
As the opening weekend for Minecraft comes to a close and the dust settles, it’s become apparent that this risky movie has become a big hit, with the largest opening weekend for a video game adaptation of all time (significant because Mario Bros made a billion dollars not too long ago following the same formula). So it’s important at this point to mention that, despite this movie’s trajectory as the first big hit of 2025 (?!?!), this is objectively a tedious movie filled with references that feel random and shoe-horned (what the fuck is a creeper and why do they explode when you hit them and why are they so similar to Toot n’ Booms from Raya and the Last Dragon?
Like, the film literally just takes some of the exact same actors from the last video game movie to make a lot of money and sort of doubles down on the things that worked: case in point, when I mentioned to a work colleague that I was seeing this movie, they said to me, Did you know it’s a musical? And a different person at work said that they weren’t expecting Jack Black to sing two entire songs (he sings at least three–“songs” is a bit of an overstatement–times at least and then has vocal credits to even more background songs in the soundtrack, which objectively rocks.
The demographic is definitely not aimed at me or the monster I brought with me. There were a lot of tweens there, fresh off of baseball practice in packs of ten or twenty, hopping turnstiles and looting popcorn from the concessions, heckling the Superman movie which looks cool. I wouldn’t say it’s the EXACT same demographic as the Minions movie, but it feels adjacent in terms of punchability? Minecraft was designed to appeal to the sensibilities of kids about ten years old and their parents born in the eighties, thirsty for some nostalgia in the wake of their diminished standing in politics, the economy, and cultural dominance.
Emma Myers (who is NOT Zoe Colletti from Only Murders in the Building, but IS the best friend from Netflix’s Wednesday) seems sort of resigned to play a double cast role as both the older sister in a Boy’s Movie and also kind of the surrogate mom? She spends a lot of time rolling her eyes at the stupid shit that Jack Black and Momoa say and then at other points she seems really happy to hold stuff for her brother or hand it to him when he needs it. She does have a couple of cool combat related scenes with some admittedly awesome music (Zero to Hero is a banger, but the lyrics have literally nothing to do with the action and actually kind of make no sense even separate from the film). Danielle Brooks plays the Black Best Friend. Jennifer Coolidge’s role is unexpectedly and unashamedly raunchy and horny, like to the extent to which it’s hard to really grasp why she was cast alongside her costars who are eight and eighteen years her junior. Like, it works for me that she wants to fuck a Minecraft guy after almost killing him with her car, but is that also supposed to land for the little leaguers in the audience or what?
Rachel House’s Pig Queen is doing a lot of work to make sure that women are not all completely prisoners to type casting, but it is absolutely amazing as a performance from top to bottom, including her final seen with Steve.
There are so many weird elements to this movie which never pay off: Momoa’s character is stuck in the glory days of his youth when he invented a form of gameplay that required no teammate for two player arcade game tournaments, but this never comes up in the context of Minecraft as a video game; Steve mentions that the people of Midport are all vegetarians but then he takes us to a fried chicken shop run by one of the villagers and then sings a fucking song about the chicken? Momoa’s face as he’s eating the chicken is actually one of the most rewarding jokes of the entire movie, so it’s forgiven as a plot hole. We go through an entire Soderbergian heist plan about the guards on different floors of the Mansion holding our MacGuffin but then we never encounter one of the three types of guardians? It’s clearly just meant to satisfy gamers despite the fact that the movie’s story can stand up on its own.
I was thinking a lot about the ways that video game adaptations like Minecraft compare to board game adaptations of the 90s and what Jumanji would look like if it took its cues from this movie, and honestly, I think by the standard of Robin Williams and Jumanji, we have a fairly similar kind of vibe: a charismatic comedian is given free rein to create a compelling character to anchor a bunch of young actor’s performances with an ensemble cast of dedicated character actors to fill out the movie, which is a little bumpy because of the seemingly random references to stuff that happens in the game which are obligatory to visualize in order to sell people on buying the merch the underlying IP is based on after the fact. That doesn’t mean that Minecraft is going to be a cult classic, but it does mean that its financial success will be easily replicable, despite the fact that other contemporary adaptations have so spectacularly failed even with Jack Black’s assistance.
