The Many Universes of the Minecraft Movie

I guess it could have been worse but it also could have tried to mean something

I was far too young to watch Shadow of Israphel when I did. I was seven years old, watching Minecraft videos for people ten years my senior, and the day afterwards I went to school and taught all my compatriots vile, awful language. Shadow of Israphel, one of the first instances of what would be at the time called Machinima and later, more accurately and embarrassingly called Minecraft roleplay, followed the adventures of Simon the dwarf and Lewis the spaceman as they quested through a curated Minecraft world to defeat the evil Israphel. As a child the mixture of low-brow comedy and slightly higher brow adventure enchanted me, perhaps because it spoke to the ethos of what Minecraft was about: there is a big world with stuff in it, and there’s more of it just over there, go on, have a look!

The Minecraft Movie was announced in 2014. At this point the Yogscast had moved on to producing Moonquest, a much looser sitcom style Minecraft series that lasted much longer than the ill-fated SOI, and I would watch those three idiot heroes attempt to put a dwarf on the moon every morning on the bus to school. I was the ideal audience, attuned to the verbiage of Minecraft, which as the movie and the game developed seemed to be becoming more and more ideal for a feature length adaptation.

Christopher Booker would call Minecraft a voyage and return. “The protagonist goes to a strange land and, after overcoming the threats it poses or learning important lessons unique to that location, returns with experience.” Upon starting a game of Minecraft, the player awakens in an unknown world with danger around every corner. They adventure, learn their surroundings, learn their world and grow to prosperity. At the end of the game they quest to defeat a dragon, whereupon two godlike voices encourage the player to take the skills they have learned during the game (creativity, perseverance, determination) and apply them to their life in the real world. Emergent mini-narratives appear. A player who quests alone is a Robinson Crusoe figure, fighting isolation, largely unguided. A player who settles in a village conversely gains more information about their world through interactions with the villagers, but becomes responsible for their welfare in their struggles against factions of raiders. Robinson Crusoe, meet Seven Samurai. The player can also choose to destroy villages and structures, but wanton cruelty serves no practical purpose for the player. Tearing down a temple can help with its navigation, but taking it apart serves no purpose unless the player is going to do something with the materials later. Part of the beauty of Minecraft is that you cannot progress without creating something of your own.

So let’s actually talk about the movie. I earnestly wanted to like it. I’m a dedicated fan of the IP. Through a bewildering mix-up I attended two separate schools during COVID, one in the mornings and one at night, and being locked down I essentially existed on my friends’ Minecraft server in the time in between. I think I slept for maybe three hours in 2021. I didn’t expect to go see it in theatres, mind. I was wary enough of chicken jockey induced cinema horror stories that I had planned to wait until it came on streaming and watch it at home, probably playing Minecraft at the same time. But last week I was going insane trying to find this one brand of cup noodles I’d had at a 7/11 in September ‘24, and I promised my friend I’d do whatever she wanted if she could tell me what it was. So I had to go to the Minecraft movie.

From the way I’d heard people talking about it, I expected it to be offensively bad, which I think was me doing the product a disservice. Yes, it was offensive, and yes it was bad, but it rarely found the grace to be both at once. I found the opening minutes promising. Jack Black leads an introductory narration that feels like he showed up to a Snapcube Sonic Dub and was unexpectedly dunked into a Hollywood soundstage. His performance is the high point of the movie. He seems to not occupy the movie’s world; it’s as if there’s a second screen in between the main movie and the viewer, where Jack Black is superimposed, able to see both dimensions, a member of neither, trapped and hollow and impotent. It’s an oddly Jerma-like performance. Next to the other cast members, it feels like they have the script but haven’t played Minecraft, and Jack Black does not have the script but hasn’t logged off his server for years. He could be described as either avant garde or postmodern were there any evidence that they didn’t just film him walking around his house and use opportune clips, blue shirt superimposed on.

Other characters include Jason Momoa as Garrett the garbage man, who I earnestly liked, despite everything about him feeling written by a homophobe. Garrett the garbage man is a washed up loser stuck in the past, and desperate to seem like more than his failing business. Garrett strikes up an implausibly written but earnestly performed rapport with Henry, played by Sebastian Eugene Hansen. Henry is the moral center of the film, as much as it has one. On his first day to school, Henry stops in Garrett’s second hand game store, where Garrett gives him some earnest advice. Jason Momoa plays loser-trying-so-hard-to-be-a-role-model well enough that after Henry accidentally blows up the potato chip factory where his sister works, I genuinely buy that Henry would rather call the guy he met that morning to come pick him up from school rather than face his sister, who he could have just cost her job. Also in the movie are two women, who I noticed but the writers seemed not to. The lack of attention given to Emma Myers and Danielle Brooks’ characters is by far the biggest failing of the movie. Emma Myers as Natalie is a very young adult who’s just become Henry’s guardian after the death of their parents, and is struggling with suddenly being given that responsibility whilst trying to start a career that can provide for both of them. Danielle Brooks as Dawn is the real estate agent who rents them their house and clearly feels responsible for this pair of kids. It’s clear this element was added to give the film some semblance of pathos, but it fails to go anywhere, mainly because the movie never actually does anything with Natalie or Dawn, and indeed keeps them separate from the boys and largely offscreen.

There’s an alternate universe where this isn’t a Minecraft movie. The film follows Henry and Natalie adjusting to orphan life in a small town. Natalie is frustrated at her joke of a job running social media for the potato chip factory. Dawn struggles with her employers, giving Natalie special leeway on the rent whilst juggling her five other jobs (this part is from the Minecraft movie, I’m not adding this in). Henry, feeling a burden to Natalie, is only able to find guidance from the town failure, Garrett the Garbage Man who runs the second hand game store, but Garrett and Natalie have different philosophies on what’s best for Henry, and Garrett’s store is going under. There are long shots of Garrett and Henry sitting on swings, taking in the suburban ennui. Natalie gives a presentation in a corner office, leaves to cry, and smokes amongst the machinery. Dodie writes an original song. The movie wins three Oscars. These two movies share the one moment of pathos that did get to me: when Jack Black as Steve looks Jason Momoa in the eyes and says, very seriously, “I’m sorry about your finances.”

Christopher Booker would call the Minecraft movie a voyage and return. After Henry accidentally blows up the chip factory, Garrett takes him back to the store to wait out the day. Garrett just accidentally purchased the macguffin from a storage auction of Steve’s old house (sidenote, why wasn’t Dawn in this scene conducting the auction? She canonically has five jobs, and works with houses. We need these characters to mesh more. It makes sense). Henry finds the macguffin, and it transports the two into the Minecraft world. Natalie and Dawn follow, searching for Henry. The cast meet Steve, master of the Minecraft world, who is also after the macguffin (the orb of dominance, which Steve and Natalie point out is cube shaped, this joke also made me laugh); they promise to exchange the orb for safe passage home. Unbeknownst to everyone, Garrett complicates the quest by making Steve take a detour to retrieve diamonds that Garrett can sell to save his store. They (and by they I mean mainly the boys) fight the piglins who are also after the orb. Everyone goes home, and they convince Steve to come with. Roll credits. The piglins: I don’t give a shit about them. I don’t give a shit that one of them is named General Chungus. Fuck it, General Chungus works. Who cares. It’s the Minecraft movie. The real conflict of the movie is the interpersonal drama that is just not suited to take place in the Minecraft setting. The movie tries to deliver a message that being creative is the hard but worthwhile path through life, but it delivers this moral by giving each of the characters a sequential part of it that never really comes together. We start with Steve, who learns that office jobs are soul crushing. Then we move to Garrett, who learns that paying rent sucks. Henry builds a jetpack and blows up the chip factory, learning that some people are dicks who will sabotage your creativity. Natalie learns that she is wrong to try and prevent such a thing from happening again by stifling Henry’s creativity when this is what saves her later on. Dawn learns… okay, Dawn is just kind of there. Were these characters ever to talk about this, perhaps they could put their pieces of the moral together like the Infinity Stones and come up with the gauntlet of convincing Steve to come back to Earth, but instead it just kind of happens. It’s dumb.

Actually, on second thought, I do want to talk about General Chungus. I want to talk about Jack Black saying ‘as a child, I yearned for the mines.’ I want to talk about the chicken jockey, the stupid dumb hamfisted meme delivery, because in all honesty these moments are the closest the movie comes to getting it. They make me think of the previous Minecraft driven storytelling sensation, the Dream SMP. I have no right to shit on Dream SMP fans, I was a Homestuck, which was worse. The Dream SMP started as another old Minecraft server streamed on Twitch.tv, but turned into a pseudo Shadow of Israphel sequel, a struggle between increasing twitch streamers and increasing factions about intra-server politics, stupid memes, and subject matter that became increasingly inscrutable to the outside eye. It’s another one on my list of Things That Are Homestuck, a batshit sillygoofy Internet Thing that people talk about like Jackson Pollock is jizzing on the Sistine Chapel. But in between the horrifyingly obtuse plot, the underlying metanarrative is this: all my friends are on the Minecraft server and they all want to do different things. Can we get along? The characters and players of the Dream SMP attach themselves to symbols, objects, ideologies, patches of land, the inscrutability is directly because they speak in an internet idiolect. Sure, I could probably tell you why c!Dream and c!Tommyinnit are fighting over the discs, but all that’s really important is that the discs just are a thing they care about. At its core, it’s about the same thing as Homestuck, which is “how do I get my friends that I care about to care about the stupid fucking thing that I care about?” Which is also the narrative of Minecraft; you build a thing all your own, and then it’s all your own. That’s the beauty, that’s the tragedy.

The Minecraft Movie fundamentally has a pretty shallow idea of creativity. Creativity is when you make something, and everyone who’s anti-creativity just got laughed at once and is bitter about it. But when you make something, you’re not entitled for anybody else to care about it. The Minecraft movie doesn’t interrogate that Natalie and Dawn and Steve and Garrett are constantly experiencing obstacles to their creativity for a reason, it just thinks they should act like they aren’t. Continuing when you get hurt is a good message, don’t get me wrong, but like. When Natalie quits her job to start a self defense class, is that a stable income to support Henry? Sure, they’re probably getting support from Garrett (now working with Steve) and Dawn, who’s now just got one job, but like, come on, really?

I guess I’d be more on board with the moral the movie tries to push if Henry’s creativity wasn’t making a literal fucking jetpack. Henry isn’t like an artist or a writer or a musician. He’s a STEM kid on steroids. He doesn’t go into the fantasy world from the mundane world and come back changed, the world he lives in is already a fantasy. He’s a prepubescent supergenius. His only problem is that some kid sabotages his jetpack the first time. Henry’s adventure doesn’t give him the confidence to keep caring about his own art, or his own self actualization, or to keep going in an economy that makes Dawn work five jobs and keeps Garrett on the edge of a breakdown or makes him feel like a burden to Natalie. The adventure just gives Henry the confidence to try again at being a supergenius who will make bucketloads of money off of a functioning jetpack he builds in five minutes in a high school science room. I’m not saying STEM is uncreative. I’m saying, like, this kid is the heart of the movie. Give him a reason to engage with what everyone else has going on.

So I guess I didn’t like it all that much. It’s not not bad. I liked a few of the jokes. I thought the action scenes were good. I really liked the soundtrack. I found its story and themes uncompelling. That’s about all I have to say about that. Two out of five diamonds or whatever. By the way, if anyone reading this has a server they can invite me to, I want in.