"A Minecraft Movie" - Sadly, exactly what I expected.

Josh
Apr 14, 2025
6 min read

Updated: May 17, 2025

Jared Hess (2025)

I blame The Super Mario Bros. Movie for this.

All it takes is one box office hit to start a trend. And the trend used to be that video game movies were terrible, like borderline unwatchable. Nowadays, video game movies are still bad but bordering on watchable. Setting the trend of bad movies was Super Mario Bros. (1993), and it was unanimously accepted that these movies were doomed (no pun intended) to be bad. Ironically, “breaking” the trend was, again, The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023). Yet, the only difference I see between then and now is that when Mario is animated, it's slightly easier to look at. Although it's less entertaining, depending on if you can pull entertainment from so bad, it's good. Where the exception tends to lie is within recent TV shows, such as The Last of Us (2023 - present) and Fallout (2024 - present). Where those shows succeed is with involvement from a creative team that prioritises storytelling and not shoving in as many story irrelevant references so the audience can soyjak in the cinema. Yet this seems to work. For both children, which the two latest hits The Super Mario Bros. Movie, by the devil incarnate Illumination Entertainment, and A Minecraft Movie seems to be targeting the most, and low IQ adults that see images of stuff they recognise from other mediums and cheer. I know I shouldn't call people who find enjoyment in something "low IQ", but when these super fans see this crap, the critical part of their brain just seems to shut down. Please, you can say something isn't good but find enjoyment in it. You can not like stuff that you enjoyed when you were a child.

A Minecraft Movie - Courtesy of Warner Bros. — *A Minecraft Movie* - Courtesy of Warner Bros.

Saying that, I loved Minecraft as a kid and a teen. In fact, I still do love it. I have urges to jump in and start a new world now and again, yet I have not touched the game in years. As goes for the community around it, so recent updates and memes aren't in my vocabulary. That being said, director Jared Hess seemed to have completely missed the fundamental aspects of the game. Creativity. And the growing ease of surviving. Creativity is something I'm surprised they fucked up so bad because, yes, it is a game akin to Lego where you can build anything. But it's building anything within the limits of the blocks format and rules of elements, with your imagination filling in the gaps. Then you’ve got the growing ease of survival, as you start a new game with 10 minutes of peace only to then have to suffer through 10 minutes of a monster-ridden night. Your first night in Minecraft is always the most tense. You can’t sleep, you’ve got no resources, so you just need to wait out the night until dawn. But then, each night becomes easier as you get a bigger house. And you expand your resources. And it’s so satisfying getting to build an automated fortress from a dirt house. We get nothing that recreates this feeling. The closest we get is a montage of Steve, Jack Black, building a variety of homes. And then our lead, Henry, played by Sebastian Hansen, just builds a high-quality fortress in no time at all. At least The Super Mario Bros. Movie got the idea that Mario needs to save someone who's captured. So, at least that’s something.

I feel like I’m wasting my breath talking about the plot because it’s a nothing plot. It’s a simple, cookie-cutter standard script that got them over the line. Even then, I had no idea what was happening, how or why. It starts with a young Steve who wants to explore the mines near his town, but he’s unable to due to his age. Grown up, he takes a standard office job that trumps his creative presentations and concepts. So, he goes back to the mine to live his dream, where he gets teleported to the Minecraft world. As mentioned, for all the adults in the audience taking their kids to the cinema, we get a long exposition dump of some of the rules and the establishment of The Nether and our lead villain, Malgosha (Rachel House). Cutting then to the more entertaining part of the film as Jared Hess's Napoleon Dynamite-isms

rear it’s head with dry strange humour. Moving to the new town are Henry and his now guardian sister, Natalie (Emma Myers), as that’s what their mother wanted after her passing… or at least that's how they interpreted the will. They meet up with a self-obsessed video-game champion, Garrett (Jason Mamoa), in his failing game store and their closest thing to an adult figure, their real estate agent cross portable zoo owner, Dawn (Danielle Brooks), and all find the cave to the Minecraft world.

Danielle Brooks, Jason Momoa, Sebastian Hansen, Emma Myers - Courtesy of Warner Bros. — *Danielle Brooks, Jason Momoa, Sebastian Hansen, Emma Myers* - Courtesy of Warner Bros.

And what should be a wondrous moment of discovery is deflated as we’ve already seen and know this world. It would be like having a 20 minute segment of Dumbledore explaining to the audience the inner workings of Hogwarts and then expecting to get the same level of wonder as Harry first walks into the great halls. Not to mention, there was no discovery of how the world works from our leads, as Henry instantly understood how to break and place bricks. Following up on not understanding the inner workings of the world, Henry creates objects that don't exist within the logic of the game, building a tator-tot gun (which I guess is a reference to Napoleon Dynamite). In Minecraft, you can build anything, but you can't invent your own tools. Again, in the game, it falls under that survival aspect, as you experiment with what is and isn't possible, then try again with new materials. But fuck it, bro should've crafted a 50 Cal. rifle or Glock 18, would've solved all his issues.

The structural editing was my biggest point of confusion; characters would be in one location and then just appear where they were required for the scene to unfold. As predicted, all characters had the exact arc you would expect… except for one… Natalie. She starts as a level-headed character who's taking a role as a social media manager for an old company. So, I was stretching to figure out where this would take shape later in the story. And so did the 8 writers because she's just suddenly a combat expert? So much so that at the end, she opens a self-defence class? She didn't have an arch; it was more like a sharp 90⁰ pivot in a random direction. And it wasn't even really used as a skill to help out in the final battle or anything. She and Dawn disappeared at the end, within a pretty sloppy battle that was dark and all over the place, so I had no idea who was where or what was happening.

I do have to admit that there were nice nods to the game and video game logic. For example, throwing down a bucket of water at the last second to cushion a fall. Red Stone contraptions to create food, although let down but a crap Jack Black song. Or a nod to the Minecraft YouTuber, Technoblade, who passed away at a young age. age. Surprisingly, there were no distracting cameos, except for Jens Dergensten, a Minecraft developer, as a waiter. I only thought it was distracting because they would not let a man with long hair work at a fancy restaurant; he should've been a comic book store owner or something. And the most enjoyable part of the movie was Jennifer Coolidge going on dates with a villager. I wish we saw more of it, but it was split between the A plot of Henry, Steve and Garret. The B plot is Natalie and Dawn building a massive house within 10 minutes. And the C plot is of Jennifer Coolidge and the Villager.

I think what hurts the most is that this won’t be the end of these types of movies. And it’s not a bad kids movie because we will continue to get stuff like Boss Baby or Minions until the end of cinema. But it’s the watering down of an IP. It’s taking an open concept and watering it down to something completely unrecognisable. Or games that have no right containing a story being forced to have one. Do we really need a movie for "The Sims"? Well, I guess we’ll find out in a few years.