A Minecraft Movie: Where Endless Imagination Goes To Die

IN THE FIRST EPISODE OF The Studio — Apple TV’s terrific comic satire about a Hollywood studio head struggling to balance his inherent cinephilia with shallow IP-driven productions — a “Kool-Aid Man” movie needs to be green-lit. He wants to green-light a Scorsese movie instead, but can’t avoid the inevitability of a flimsy branded franchise in a post-Barbie landscape. That’s what A Minecraft Movie is. It’s a numbers-driven adaptation of the all-time best-selling Swedish video-game that, ironically, is all about pure creation and imagination. For a film that’s based on the limitless concept of building things and crafting entire 3D terrains out of thin air, A Minecraft Movie is painfully generic fan service that relies on nothing but familiarity, nostalgia, the same old Jack Black shenanigans and a surprisingly funny Jason Momoa. And the 3D is bad, too.

I’ve always wondered why video-games — often considered the purest form of post-modern storytelling — are adapted into big-screen popcorn flicks by studios. Sure, these movies are easy children’s money, but the point of games is that they offer you a chance to control the story. Movies based on those games take that control away. Transforming interactive player experiences into viewer experiences feels like a step down; it reduces the act of escaping into the illusion of escaping. Rant done, I feel lighter now.

Coming back to the futile and forgettable family-friendliness of A Minecraft Movie, it revolves around the unofficial mascot of the game and its most modifiable skin, Steve (Black), in an infinite-possibilities portal and cubic wonderland called the Overworld. Steve’s ‘mission’ is twofold. He must guide a group of four real-world misfits — newly orphaned siblings Natalie (Emma Myers) and Henry (Sebastian Hansen), hustler Dawn (Danielle Brooks), and 1989 world gaming champion Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Momoa) — to a place that gives them a thing that’ll help them go back to the real world. I’m not being specific here because I cannot remember all the look-so-much-fantasy names. Steve embarks on this anything-goes quest with them through the Overworld in return for a magical orb, which he needs as leverage to protect his pet wolf Dennis from the evil queen of the imagination-less and sunless Nether, Malgosha (Rachel House).

Throw in some wise-cracking set pieces, iconic pop-cultural cameos from the game, a very Coolidge-coded Jennifer Coolidge track, and some utterly sparkless and basic commentary. In case you’re wondering, Malgosha rose to be the bitter leader of the Nether after being mocked for trying to be artful on ‘Nether’s Got Talent’. For Indians, her arc brings to mind Amitabh Bachchan’s Narayan Shankar from Mohabbatein — the sullen old naysayer who strived to turn the college he ran, Gurukul, into a loveless and dark institution like him.

The problem with A Minecraft Movie is that it’s rigged against the self-driven wonders and charms of the game it adapts. It exists in a post-Pixels, post-Lego-Movie and post-Mario Bros. universe as well, so it’s nothing the kids haven’t seen before in terms of ‘inventiveness’. Except for Momoa’s Macho-Man-Randy-Savage-meets-The-Rock rendition of a muscular loser, the characters are pretty flat too. Dennis is a cute dog-wolf, that’s about it. Henry is technically the teenage protagonist because he’s the restless nerd whose genius is misunderstood and bullied in the real world. So this cubic building heaven is supposed to expose all his untapped talent and give everyone else the confidence to be themselves. The film wastes multiple opportunities to capitalise on its genre-fluidity; there are zombies and weird boxy animals and deadpan humour everywhere, but it’s all so formulaic that it feels like a Disney parody of an Edgar Wright parody. There’s a bit of Pixar and Dreamworks, though nothing as original as the similarly-themed Inside Out.

It stages a fairly straightforward message about the necessity of art and agency in an age of garish and predatory capitalism. Never mind that it’s told in the language of that same garish capitalism. There’s nothing meta or self-aware about it. The unlikely chemistry between Black and Momoa is hardly enough to dismantle this irony. The in-joke is that Steve — the most shapeless and one-fit-for-all character of the game — is given a mild backstory. The reason he’s been a crafter for years in the fantastical Overworld is because he needed to get away from his mechanical and dream-killing life on Earth. It’s such a drastic escape that it’s almost a metaphor for madness (or limbo in Inception speak). Who can blame Steve? The place he escaped is the place where A Minecraft Movie and the Kool-Aid Man Movie are spun into summer blockbusters. I recommend watching The Remarkable Life of Ibelin instead — a moving documentary about how a terminally ill gamer ‘lived’ a rich life in the make-believe universe of World of Warcraft before he died.