Yeah, I was waiting on the DVD for A Minecraft Movie.
The trailers were all thinly-veiled commercials for the game, rather than the movie, and every joke was some variation of “Well, that happened.” I never picked up a controller to play any of the games, and I am not a fan of director Jared Hess. No, I don’t like Napoleon Dynamite, I couldn’t even sit through the first half-hour.
I’m just about as far removed from the target demographic as anyone could get. I might further add that I’ve written at great length about how WB has found themselves in a death spiral since the ill-fated AT&T buyout. So of course I predicted that nothing good would come from this movie, and of course those who were actually in the target demographic proved me wrong.
The reception to this movie was fascinating to watch. The critics thoroughly shredded this picture, but the fans made it a near-billion-dollar hit. Thus I decided that the best course of action was to wait for DVD and get some distance from the controversy.
Ten minutes into this movie, I could already identify the root cause of the controversy: This script is trash.
Every character in this movie is a one-dimensional archetype and their development arcs barely deserve to be called as such. The plot is a standard MacGuffin hunt and the antagonist has no personality or motivation beyond “pure evil”. The exposition and thematic development are both aggressively blunt. None of the characters are remotely interesting or sympathetic because they’re all treated as if “nuance” is radioactive. Every character is a one-note joke and that joke gets aggressively beaten into the ground within half a minute.
Worst of all, we get a character death in the third act and nobody mourns after it happens. Sure, it’s an obvious fake-out, but still. Even the most godawful horror movie I’ve ever seen tried to wring out more crocodile tears than this. I can’t remember the last time I ever saw a cast of characters who were so unsympathetic and had so little sympathy for each other. It’s astounding.
There is no subtlety here whatsoever. The actors are all aggressively over-the-top in mugging for the camera at all times. In literally every aspect of the film — from the action to the world-building to the character development to the thematic development — there is no sign whatsoever of thought or creativity or intelligence. And all the actors seem like they’re perfectly aware of how aggressively stupid and unfunny this whole thing is, which somehow makes it even worse. If anything, all the self-referential “well, that happened” lampshading only calls attention to how obnoxious this whole movie is, and everyone involved knew that well in advance!
I want to say that this movie was made with genuine disdain for the target audience… except that the target audience obviously lapped it right up. This brainless, derivative, repetitive dreck was made for fans of a game that’s supposedly all about creativity, and the fans loved it. Makes me glad I’m not a fan.
It’s perfectly clear that the only real priority here was in portraying the game. Totally understandable. And admittedly, there are some pretty sweet practical set designs and props to break up the green screen. Even so, if all this effort was getting put into making this cartoon world, the filmmakers should’ve gone ahead and made the whole thing animated. Chalk that up as yet another way in which the filmmakers tried ripping off The Lego Movie without any understanding or appreciation for what made that movie work. Hell, even The Super Mario Bros. Movie knew enough to make the whole thing animated and not a live-action/CGI hybrid, and that movie had better cause for doing so!
Seriously, trying to make a movie that’s all about celebrating creativity and doing it by blatantly ripping off another movie is a godawful idea on its face. I might add that while creativity is supposedly the key to survival in the Minecraft world, pretty much all of the action scenes depend on slapstick dumbfuckery more than crafting objects or finding solutions. Even worse, it’s yet another movie with a villain whose sole motivation is all about finding more gold. An anti-greed message in a movie that was blatantly made as a 100-minute commercial for a video game. Come the fuck on.
(Side note: As a reminder, the villain in The Lego Movie wasn’t really motivated by profit, so much as he was a workaholic who put time and effort into his career at the expense of his kids. It’s a subtle difference, and the filmmakers of Minecraft show a fatal allergy to subtlety.)
Look, I grew up watching Space Jam and Good Burger multiple times. I know what it’s like to have treasured childhood memories of watching a movie that was godawful at the time and only got worse with adult sensibilities. That’s exactly where A Minecraft Movie is headed. It’s a childish movie in all the worst ways, not only loud and stupid and void of creativity, but openly proud to be so. This is a movie specifically engineered to kill brain cells.
I can’t begrudge the studios for trying to make a quick buck off of Minecraft. I can’t begrudge them for pouring $150 million into making everything look right. Hell, I can’t even begrudge anyone in the cast, as they all clearly knew what movie they were making and they were doing their best to have a good time with it.
Mostly, I just feel sorry for the fans. For the life of me, I don’t get why the fans responded so positively to such an egregious insult against their intelligence and taste. Maybe they were satisfied with a faithful depiction of the game itself, but that shouldn’t be enough. They deserved better than this. Even the games themselves deserved better than this.
Of course a sequel is in development and I’ll be interested to see if that one is received just as well. Gods willing, we’ll get a “delayed bomb” and the audience will have aged out of this film series by the time the sequel hits (see also: The Princess Diaries and its sequel). Time will tell. Until then, fuck this movie.