'A Minecraft Movie' briefing

1 (out of 4)

            “Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made.”

Every once in a while we get a cinematic glimpse into the future, and this time what we see truly terrifies us — A Minecraft Movie, in more ways than one, is nothing less than manmade horrors beyond our comprehension. Is there any other reason to think of why it might be on its way to a tidy billion, besides God despising us? 

Or, to those maybe 21 and under, it’s finally time for funny-book boys to fuck off and gamerbros to take over as Sonic, and especially Mario, indicated they promptly would. But those classic game characters at least were, um, characters? See there was something to work with — Minecraft doesn’t have the putty, or should I say the digital legos, to make it all work, and no I’m not looking into the ‘lore,’ why the hell should I? The adaptative genre in cinema has just become a long, updated take on light, all ages fluff for pixel people, and of course there’s just so many better versions of portal fantasy, breaking into another world, often one of PURE IMAGINATION: The Wizard of Oz, Spirited Away, hell TRON is better, hell TRON: Legacy is better (ARCADE SHIT, ah a theme!) — this is just the lame post-post-modernist version of potentially wholesome kid-stuff. Ever heard of PAGEMASTER? SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL? A Minecraft Movie mostly exists as the trite, zoomerfied version of a kids classic and is unworthy in all ways.

Listen, if you want to test your insomnia while waiting to pick someone up from the airport, this Minecraft thing serves some meager purpose ONLY because Jack Black is treating this shit with extraordinary volatility, like it was School of Rock 2. I can’t believe how much unbridled exuberance this guy harbors, his madcap mania stringing you along if you can sanction that sort of buffoonery. But my, past the 80s kitsch courtesy, in some small way, to the slimmest of visions WB allowed director Jared Hess, this is as numbing as, well, other studio-specific shit like Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Space Jam: A New Legacy or any other pandering, expensive, achingly pointless, hardly human affairs. You can reference tater tots, feature awkward romance, self-defense training and/or buff douchebags, any elements of the Northwestern dry humor of Napoleon Dynamite but it won’t help, it doesn’t make Minecraft more since it's part of a “filmography,” — yes I notice how well Black served Hess in Nacho Libre (playing a MEXICAN? lol NOT TODAY BUSTER) but from Gentleman Broncos on is pan city for Hess and I don’t need to check out the fathoms of his almost abrasively kitsch proclivities.

Needless to say, unless you are waiting to toss your corn when the chicken jockey thing happens (DON’T ASK ME I’M TOO OLD DAMMIT) there’s just simply very little reason to welcome this particular item of cultural phenomena into your brainspace. It’s not humorous, inventive, narratively nimble or winsome character-wise — in fact I’ve never seen a movie so soundly shoehorn the whole uncooperative central characters breaking down into eventual friendship with none of the work put in. I don’t dislike Danielle Brookes, Emma Myers, Jason Mamoa or that random kid (Sebastian Hansen), but this hollow Jumanji-knockoff-of-a-knockoff has so little functionality and such painfully muffled themes on being yourself or fuck knows what else. The LEGO Movie is left looking like a masterpiece of WB product placement moviemaking, but regardless Minecraft will be putting up Barbie box office numbers…. Hey at least there are no GODDAMN POLITICS in my children’s movie, um POINTS!

This movie doesn’t make something out of nothing, ergo it has nothing to build the next something out of… It was super annoying, boring and barely even bothered to BE a waste of time LET ALONE an actual movie, or a meta meme of a movie. It’s a true snake oil sell, as spiteful towards its audience as I heard Five Nights At Freddy’s was — “ah, it doesn’t matter what we do! Whatever we did that was lazy we had to do for the sake of adaptation…” as Black’s character STEVE says, “…Cowards take the deuce” — and A Minecraft Movie definitely took a deuce all over my face.