A washed-up video game champion, two parentless siblings, and a welcome wagon go-getter must find everyman Steve and the Orb of Dominance to escape a strange land made of craftable cube, ruled by a pig witch queen.
You knew this was coming, after the success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie a few years ago. This didn’t need to be a good movie, or even a movie at all—at this point, Minecraft is a force of nature with its own universe of memes and subcultures. It’s big enough to have a cadre of orbiting complimentary industries; the other day, I had a chance but lengthy conversation with a lady that works as a building designer—yes, it’s very much a specialization in the game—for multi-million subscriber YouTube channel of exclusively Minecraft-focused videos. The entire crazy zeitgeist was exactly what was delivered here in distilled form, cut with a bit of cinematic juice and a hint of a narrative story, laced with two A-list male leads and an assorted supporting roles to fill in the plot and diversity quotas.
There are some earmarks of Jared Hess’ directing style, like the B story with impossibly awkward side characters, crazy gadgets that seem to work better than they should (fits well with the subject matter), the montages with extreme zooms and closeups. You can tell he was held back a bit by studio and agent demands that kept him from giving it the full Napoleon Dynamite or Nacho Libre treatment, but that’s expected. He had to stuff all the appropriate jokes and memes the kids (pre-teen boys and up) were expecting. Hess’ strong Mormon background and his track record of mostly wholesome stories the kids wouldn’t be embarrassed to watch with their parents made him a good pick.
As mentioned, the plot, or what passes for one: get the Macguffin to return home. The real draw is seeing Minecraft transposed into a CGI world and having celebrities react to everything. It was something of a smart move, like Mario before it, to pose the Minecraft world as an alternate dimension instead of the protagonists being sucked into the actual Minecraft game itself. Yes, Steve eventually said something along the lines of “mining” and “crafting,” for the benefit of the older folks that brought their grandkids, but I feel like that had to be established anyway.
As expected, the two leads get character redemption arcs while the two supporting gals and the vaguely autistic brother only get practical arcs: “do the thing” or “realize the thing that was always there” and not “not just my circumstances but my actual self changed.” Mamoa’s Garrett Garrison (lol) had to move on from his past accomplishments to focus on the present, and Black had to come clean morally with his intentions. I don’t think it’s because Black and Mamoa were men, necessarily, but that helps because we expect men in stories to have that one fundamental character flaw they need to fix by the end of the story.
The funniest part was the Orb of Dominance—aka: Totally Not the Tesseract from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was a cube because it came from the Minecraft world and it caused a bit of confusion with the real-world characters. Sometimes it’s the most subtle things that are the humorous.