‘A Minecraft Movie’: Years in the Making and Still No Match for the Game

The theater was not packed at 4 p.m. on a weeknight, but it was buzzing with the energy from kids ranging in ages from about 6 or 7 to teenagers. A few kids walked down the aisle carrying blocky foam swords (which used to litter my basement) and everyone looked happy to be there. It was the opening day of “A Minecraft Movie,” and I must admit I was excited.

Minecraft has been in my house longer than my children have. My husband played with his friends when the game was first released, then our boys watched him play when they were little, and eventually went through their own obsessive phase in elementary school.

While I tried to keep my expectations in check (this is, after all, a movie based on a video game), I must admit I went in hopeful. If movies like “Barbie” and “The Lego Movie” have shown us anything, it’s that movies like this don’t have to feel like a corporate cash grab. They can be good. They can be about something. Sadly, this was not the case with “A Minecraft Movie.”

This is not to say it was all terrible. Jack Black brings his Tenacious D intensity from the moment he appears on screen and never lets up for one second. He pulls the movie along, and you can’t help but feel psyched about how cool Minecraft is every time he talks. Jason Momoa is surprisingly funny as the aging video game champ, and while Jennifer Coolidge’s scenes are brief, she is funny and enduring as usual.

But even so, I left unsatisfied, and I think I realize why: The things that make the game great are missing, and their absence made the movie disappointing.

Minecraft is all about creativity.

From the moment my kids started playing Minecraft they were amazed at what they could do. They built houses, giant buildings, sculptures, castles, boats, and on and on. Building, being creative, is the best part of this game. And while there were moments of creativity in the movie, they were quite brief. Most of the time the characters were just running around on a Lord of the Rings-style quest, the building scenes were few and far between.

Minecraft can be slow and calm. Things in this world take time.

One of the great things about the game is the exploration. You can run, walk or even fly around the Minecraft world and discover all sorts of animals and landscapes. When you do want to build, first you have to gather all the supplies; projects take time and planning in this game. But in the movie, everything happens at lightning speed. I know this is the nature of an under two-hour movie, but the whole thing felt incredibly rushed.

There is so much to see in Minecraft!

There are multiple dimensions in the game, not to mention all the different environments, above and below water. While the movie showed a little of that, it barely scratched the surface. Our heroes spent all their time running through the world rather than experiencing any of it.

Minecraft feels nearly universal.

This was perhaps the choice I found the oddest — in the world of our human heroes, the game Minecraft apparently does not exist. When they find themselves magically transported there, no one knows what it is or what’s going on. What a missed opportunity! How much more fun would it have been to watch a kid with Minecraft game skills get to save the day when they are sucked into the game world! I think many kids who play the game imagine what it would be like to be in Minecraft. I can’t believe the movie didn’t take advantage of that fantasy.

The connection between the real world and the fantasy world is often what makes movies based on brands work (think of “Barbie”). But, rather than being excited to find themselves in a world they love and understand, our heroes are confused and have to learn everything about basic building from scratch. Kids in the real world know what Minecraft is, it felt strange that our heroes in the movie did not.

The bottom line

Are your kids going to want to see this movie? Almost certainly. Should you let them? Why not. It’s rated PG and while there is fighting and some killing of bad guys, there is absolutely no blood in sight, and when things die they simply turn into something else (a skeleton becomes a single bone, for example) just like in the game.

But if you really want to experience all the great things Minecraft has to offer, do yourself a favor and just play the game.