cinema is cooked more than steve's lava chicken

my rant about the new abomination they titled "a minecraft movie"

i wanted to die of embarrassment when he started singing here

A Minecraft Movie is unequivocally the worst movie I have ever seen in a theatre.

Actually, I take that back. A Minecraft Movie is the worst movie I have ever had the misfortune to watch. Period. It makes my bad experience at the Super Mario Movie pale in comparison to the social horror I endured for the eternity of the two hours I sat in a Studio Movie Grill.

To be clear, I did not want to see this movie, but my husband and another friend did. I knew that this movie was not going to be great, but holy blocks, Batman.

It is so much worse than I expected. This movie is horrible.

I have never seen a movie so devoid of the ingredients that make movies so wonderful. Remember in my War of the Rohirrim review how I said making a movie is like baking a cake? Baking is a science, so if you tweak anything about the recipe, it could come out different or nasty. If I could describe the kind of cake A Minecraft Movie is, it would be a smoldering heap of flour: the kind of heap that the fire department gets called for and the extinguisher is brought out and there’s smoke damage on the ceiling.

The theatre was packed with families, and I was sitting down near the front. I’m a back-row-middle-seat kinda gal, but it was opening weekend and the theatre had throngs of people coming in and out to see this highly anticipated film. Our particular theatre was rowdy; at one point I did have something thrown at me, but nothing like the disturbances like I’ve seen on social media. However, there was a particularly annoying group of fourth to six grade boys that were trying to get the whole theatre to clap all through the movie. At one point, I did give the mullet-sporting kid in front of me a swift kick in the back of his theatre chair, and he quit for a bit, looking slightly surprised at my arched quit it dude eyebrow I gave him. Later on, I realized that the dad of the boys was egging them on and also clapping at inappropriate times during the film. I think teaching your kids to misbehave in a movie theatre is fantastic parenting. (not).

When I say inappropriate times, I mean it. It’s one thing to clap and cheer and whistle when there is a big action moment or the good guys get a victory: it is a whole different subject when people are clapping in the middle of serious dialogue or when characters are simply moving around. I also don’t think there’s any point of the movie that deserved the honor as there wasn’t a moment that particularly moved or captivated me. Clapping when Captain America says Avengers Assemble? Yes. Clapping when Jack Black’s Steve says a meme? NO.

Before I get too in the weeds, let me walk you through my individual complaints about this movie, and then I won’t have to think about it again. Praise the Lord.

could not tell you a single person’s name except Henry

The Acting is Abysmal

You know when you’re watching a movie or tv show and you can tell when it’s green screen? That’s how the majority of this movie feels. Watching the human characters interact with the Minecraft world made me feel almost bad for the effects team. A lot of the motions of the human characters didn’t come across like they were actually in the world. There were several scenes where the effects were obvious and for a split second the human and Minecraft world were not operating in tandem. I’m hoping this movie also signals the return to practical effects for more movies. Shogun and Rings of Power both used physical sets that just feel so much more real than filming in front of a green or blue screen.

As for the rest of the acting, it was as good as it gets when the script sounds like it came from ChatGPT. The voiceover work was fine. My two biggest gripes were Jack Black and Jason Momoa.

Jason Momoa is an OK actor. I’ve never seen the show, but apparently he did well on Game of Thrones, and I liked him in the serious role of Duncan in Dune. This movie did him no favors. He came off as goofy and untrustworthy. He has lines that he delivers with gusto but made no sense at all. The first fifteen minutes of the movie are about him running a video game store and being an Atari champion, but it really had no effect on the plot other than him being greedy and weird.

I expected much more to Jack Black, who acted as though his notes were: just be yourself. Most of the projects I enjoy him in the most are when he does voiceover work (any other Kung Fu Panda stans here?). I loved him in The Holiday, I hated Guilliver’s Travels, and I cannot reiterate enough how much I adore Kung Fu Panda. He was the only saving grace of the Super Mario Movie (and was a meme in that movie for a while). In this movie, he played an over-the-top version of Jack Black. He delivered his lines way too aggressively, and the bits of song he manages to get into this movie are bad. It’s not like in the Super Mario Movie when Bowser has a brief interlude singing to Peach: the songs are awkward and off-putting in the Minecraft movie.

like, what even is this. what is this. it looks so bad.

It’s Not Really Minecraft At Its Core

The fact that I was playing Minecraft before the majority of children sitting in that theatre with me were born is…jarring. Minecraft came out in 2009, which was sixteen years ago. (Yeah, I know.) I have been playing on and off since 2011. I’ve been playing Minecraft for fourteen years. I am pretty bad at the game, but I have several week stints where I will play for hours just for the heck of it. I understand the basic mechanics and have watched the game go through several major updates and additions.

One of the biggest problems of this movie is that it doesn’t understand the nature of the game at all. Minecraft is a sandbox game, a term meaning that once you boot up the game you can do anything you want. There are two modes: in Creative, you have all the resources at your disposal. You can build a scale model of Minas Tirth; you can build a pixel version of Donkey Kong; you can build a working clock. The possibilities are limitless. Survival Mode is different: you start with nothing at your disposal except the materials immediately in front of you. The days in Minecraft are fifteen minutes long, and monsters spawn in your world as soon as the sun sets, making the world a danger to the player.

The beauty of the game is that creativity or survival is dependent on one variable: the player. The player decides what to make or what steps to take to survive in the world. I’ve used Minecraft to build little machines in Creative, survive a world with my friends, and play hours of minigames on a public server during the pandemic.

While the movie uses the name, the look, and a few of the basic rules, the movie isn’t about “Minecraft” at all. This movie is about five odd people that get lost in an alternate dimension. The movie breaks many of the rules or ignores standards long set in the game. For example, there’s a scene where Henry kills an Enderman. Any seasoned player of the game knows that they are not easy to kill, and wildly swinging an axe with no armor would probably result in death and waking up in your bed in the game. Another scene involves the two human girls attempting to find a map from the villagers. Again, any player with knowledge of the game knows dozens of rules when it comes to bartering from villagers (giving them bread, leveling up the villagers, the villagers not having what you want, etc). The movie may use the aesthetics and creatures of the Minecraft universe, but it operates under its own set of rules separate from the game. This in itself isn’t a crime as there are loads of Minecraft stories and content, but in this universe Minecraft isn’t even a video game, even though video games exist and are talked about in the world of this movie.

i am deadly serious when i say that she was the funniest part of the movie

It’s Not Funny. For Anyone.

This movie would have been worth the terrible etiquette and cringey memes if it was at least funny. It’s not hard to make a funny movie. I can already smell the comments on this post: aren’t you a little old for the minecraft movie? Don’t you know that this movie is for kids? It’s childish humor?? Get over it!

I laughed exactly once during the movie, and I’ll tell you exactly when. Jennifer Coolidge is at dinner with the incoherent Villager on a romantic date. The waitress walks up and asks, “Are you finished?” To which Jennifer replies, “No, he’s Swedish.” Hilarious, right?

My friends and I were the ONLY PEOPLE that laughed IN THE ENTIRE THEATER.

Let me drive this home for you Dear Reader: Jack Black saying “Chicken Jockey!” in a funny voice got a standing ovation, but the only actually funny line got DEAD SILENCE. The only remotely clever joke in the entire film got NOTHING.

I witnessed the death of comedy not on a stage but in a matinee Saturday showing of the freaking Minecraft movie.

One of the lines that got the biggest laughs was when the villain calls up “General Chungus”. That’s right, we got a Chungus meme mention in the year of our Lord twenty twenty-five. If you don’t know what that is, then congratulations! Here’s a cookie for Not As Chronically Online As This Substack Author.

for reference, this is Big Chungus in internet lore

I understand that this movie has memes. I understand that this movie is highly anticipated and appeals to a lot of people (most of which are under the legal driving age). That does NOT mean people can act like that in a theatre. Drinks poured, popcorn thrown, film flashlights on, and screaming? Be so for real, this movie is not worth any of that behavior. I gasped when Loki died, but I didn’t scream. I didn’t chuck my Coke Zero into the next row when the Rohirrim chanted Death at the oncoming Orc army. I didn’t toss my popcorn bucket when Hiccup reunited with Toothless. The difference between A Minecraft Movie and those two movies is that those movies deserve respectful claps and cheers. The Minecraft movie absolutely and without a doubt does not. I leaned over to my husband forty-five minutes in and begged to leave. Please, I pleaded. I can’t do another hour of this.

Besides all the clapping that made me want to hide under a boulder, Jack Black started singing in the middle of the movie. If you weren’t aware, Jack Black is in a band and is a very talented individual. He starts singing in the middle of the movie without warning. This movie, may I add, is very much not a musical. Even my musically inclined husband made a disgusted expression. It was so, SO bad. Even the other characters in the movie were taken aback.

This movie is not clever, fun, or humorous. There are lines that are cheesy that are definitely designed to be big laughter moments, but even some of those didn’t hit the easily entertained audience I found myself sitting in. This movie commits the cardinal sin of being bad and unfunny. I’ve seen some bad movies that were entertaining, amusing, or so bad it ends up being enjoyable. Unfortunately, a Minecraft Movie is none of these things. A school buddy wrote on his Letterboxd that a quote from the movie made him think of the tv show Avatar: The Last Airbender, and that he spent the rest of the movie thinking about how much he wanted to watch that instead of the movie. Dear Reader, a movie has got to be pretty dang unenjoyable if it makes you think about other projects that are more worth your time.

I would like to make something very clear: this movie is not for children because it shouldn’t be for anyone. I firmly believe if I asked an AI software to come up with a concept for a movie based on Minecraft it would do a better job. (This is not a compliment; I am artificial intelligence’s number one hater, especially when it comes to stealing work from creatives). It is hard for me to fathom that actual living, breathing humans that love movies and love their job made this monstrosity. Instead of learning that creatively bankrupt movies make money, I want movie studios to take this movie as a bad omen for the future of cinema. Big companies do not care about making art anymore; they only care about profit. Cinema, and Gen Alpha, are doomed.