The grade school kids at A Minecraft Movie had a rollicking good time laughing, talking back to the screen, and doing karaoke repetitions of the dialogue as though appreciating something of their own — a familiar, private joke, a playground, a fun movie. This was different from the oohs and ahhs at Marvel products, whose viewers merely go along with standard overactive, violent manipulation.
It’s surprising that A Minecraft Movie hits the sweet spot of entertainment by finding the childlike essence of its source — a video game first marketed in 2011– and translating that into narrative. Jack Black does his overgrown-child routine as Steve, a man whose childhood fascination with mining is fulfilled when he digs up a portal to a fantasy land, the Overworld. Steve communes with other lonely souls: Garrett Garrison (Jason Momoa), a has-been champion gamer; and Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and Natalie (Emma Myers), a pair of orphaned siblings whose need for companionship and self-worth are transferred to the Overworld.
This hybrid of The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings expands a digital game board into a hallucinogenic place where everything — including inhabitants — is cubic, angular but soft. “A world where anything you can imagine is possible,” Steve explains “as long as what you imagine can be built out of blocks.” A Minecraft Movie returns viewers to kindergarten or preschool playtime.
Steve and the gang learn that “anything you can dream about here you can make.” So it also recaptures the roots of capitalist innovation. Whether those boisterous kids realize it or not, A Minecraft Movie connects them to what used to be an industrialized nation’s cultural heritage — and may still be even if outsourced manufacturing has removed actual places of industry. (Steve’s mantra “First we mine, then we craft!” sparked the audience’s most spontaneous outburst.)
A Minecraft Movie attacks the cultural inertia that has deadened contemporary Hollywood/America. It was directed by Jared Hess, best known for the eccentric indie film Napoleon Dynamite, whose sensibility pervades this production, financed by Iceland’s video game developer Mojang and its executives Torfi Frans Ólafsson and Vu Bui.
Like fans who made a genuine, grassroots hit of Napoleon Dynamite, kids at A Minecraft Movie understand the filmmaker’s comic wavelength and respond in kind. Hess transforms the manic Jack Black into an empathetic clown whose childlike ability to turn bad luck into good potential epitomizes exactly how gaming works. New motor skills extend the imagination — a habit most children eventually outgrow. Imagination was key to the films that Hess made after Napoleon Dynamite: the soulful Nacho Libre, in which Jack Black as a novice monk and Lucha Libre fan gave a fully rounded characterization, and the ingenious fantasy-fiction parody Gentlemen Broncos.
Hess’s fondness for American eccentrics (also displayed in Don Verdean and Masterminds) bewilders film-culture gatekeepers, but it finds unlikely devotees among youth unconcerned with the pseudo-sophistication of virtue-signaling films (whether Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse or Love, Simon) that attempt to teach social justice messages. This affection is palpable when kids laugh right back at Steve’s wild-eyed merriment and his sympatico rivalry with Garrett. Hulking Jason Momoa’s long-haired pink-jacketed outsider matches the young-Santa impishness of Jack Black’s Steve. Their big-brother/little-brother vibe is more affecting than the relationship between siblings Natalie and Henry, typical Hollywood urchins whose brave action-movie routines are exceptional only for their cubistic, pillowy environs. The conventional exploits are paced with tasty visual surprises (a steaming roast chicken, a succulent pork chop). Garrett tells Steve “Via con Dios,” adding that it means, “Goodbye, brother”; only when Natalie corrects him (it means “Go with God”) does the film’s parallel-universe parable touch on the Christian benevolence that distinguishes Hess from other American filmmakers.
It’s Hess’s humanist generosity that informs the lavish, otherworldly landscapes (“It looks like a giant Cinnamon Toast Crunch,” piped an exited teen); it also defines how we view the team of oddball heroes (seekers). These include pudgy realtor and aspiring petting-zoo owner Dawn (Danielle Brooks) and Henry’s blowsy school vice principal (Jennifer Coolidge), who falls in love with one of the Overworld’s unibrow villagers who enters the real-world dimension.
Most of these ideas pop up and disappear amidst the lavish visual design, yet there’s freewheeling improvisation throughout (Momoa turns a pair of nunchuks into “buckjuckets,” and Gentleman Bronco’s Jemaine Clement enhances the voice cast). A winsome, larky chase sequence is scored to “Your Own Private Idaho,” by the B-52s, which provides the best definition of Hess’s idiosyncrasy since When In Rome’s “The Promise” graced Napoleon Dynamite.
A Minecraft Movie recaptures the innocence that Steven Spielberg has lost, especially in his own overwrought gamer film Ready Player One. Who could guess that a movie starring Jack Black would not be irritating? Or that yet another movie based on a video game would avoid sensory deprivation? A Minecraft Movie conveys a sense of joy along with silliness. Out of the amusement of babes comes a perfect alternative to the current tariffs panic.