A Minecraft Movie (2025)
Be there and be square.
I felt like a no-stress straight forward flick, and still wanted to get through some of my rather extensive back log of movies that I keep meaning to see and just haven’t yet so tonight’s was relatively easy. Part of that is because it was free on Hulu - and if you can believe it, I didn’t even notice that the entire length of the movie there was a HBO watermark at the bottom of the screen until I had to get pictures for the review tonight. Goes to show how easy it is to miss details when you are just letting the movie take you for a ride aye? Anyways, think inside the box and return to the mines, tonight we watch A Minecraft Movie.
Turns out the movie isn’t just called “Minecraft” after all. Anyways, the logistical feat that making a decent movie with live action elements based around Minecraft, a game about building and mining everything and anything your little adorable heart can imagine doesn’t exactly lead me to expect a great deal of story from the movie, but surely there must be something here as it’s not common for movie studios to drop a bunch of cash on things that are just an hour and a half of unrelated rambling through budget. A boy wants to work in the mine, but can’t because he’s too young. After growing up, he remembers his dreams and goes back to do so, only to discover a strange crystal and a cube, and when the two combine it opens a portal to an Overworld, where the sky and your imagination is the limit. When he comes across another portal and completes it’s construction, he gets in over his head in a realm of gold-seeking pigs out to rule the Overworld with the power of his orb - the cube - so he sends it and his faithful wolf-dog away to the real world to hide the orb. Out the real world, a group of misfits find the thing and flip themselves in - opening up the danger of the pigs once again taking over the Overworld.
I feel like I can just say it now and skip having to repeat myself over and over again - the entire movie is going to be a bit hit or miss. You’ll like it or you won’t, and that’s going to apply to the actors, effects, characters - all of it! The actors here do a fine job, although what they are working with is so coated in absolute cheese and goofiness that you might not always feel like they are doing a great job. Entertainment value is there, and some actors definitely sell that entertainment better (like Black) then some of the others. A great example of this is the assistant principal - the actress is certainly doing what I think they wanted her to do, but in my case I would have been much more content with just ditching that characters parts after the transition to the Overworld entirely. Still, even for the ones that are doing a good job most if not all the time, you can certainly get that feeling of a lot of green screen going.
Characters are about as shallow as a generic family movie can be. You’ve got the old gamer guy who used to be someone and now is kind of washed up and lonely that needs to learn the power of friendship, you’ve got the super inventive kid who is (gasp!) a nerd! That’s the kind of depth you are really getting out of the movie - about as little as you can to potentially motivate some scenes and reasons. Is it anything ground breaking? Heck nah, but part of it feels like it’s intended for a pre-teen audience and they were afraid to make it too serious or deep because of it. Part of it feels like it might be whatever character is there is just overshadowed by the absolute extremes of acting going on.
The adventuring party
Effects look great in my opinion. Now, yes it’s not straight Minecraft super lo-fi voxels everywhere, but it’s enough that it carries the general spirit while still making an effort to draw in an audience to a big screen theater. It’s bright, it’s colorful, and it has a bunch of references to easter egg folks with in jokes and the likes. They didn’t really go with super realistic effects, but at the same time it still looks pretty high quality and good. It’s that “intentionally cartoony” kind of look at things, and I feel that it worked pretty fine for this flick. There’s a couple explosions in here that look absolutely phenomenal, and it’s not all just CG stuff either - we got some solid practical stuff in here as well. I can also say that there is some level of “costumes” even though it’s mostly still modern wear despite it’s absolutely flamboyant colors and the likes. You won’t have any hard times picking characters apart at all.
Setting gets to be wacky thanks to the Minecraft world setting. You get some real world in there as well, but most the interesting stuff comes from our world of effects - mines, villages, lava-filled underworlds, mansions filled with axe wielding evil villagers, and even some neat flying stuff. It’s varied enough that you don’t really get sick of it, even when when it doesn’t stand out from other moments. Again coming into play, there is that level of green screen going on at times, where it’s pretty clear that things aren’t quite lining up - it might be a bad thing to some, but a lot of it ends up feeding into the corniness of the entire thing. Just about he only thing missing is some underwater action really.
Audio is there, but man Hulu was just an absolute battle about it. I had to crank my headphones to the point where if a audio queue popped up on my computer I probably would have gone deaf to feel like it was at a decent volume. Mostly, this was just a knock against the service master level - I imagine if I had watched it from Amazon or a disc it’d be a different story. Balancing was largely okay - you could hear folks when it was intended, even during action scenes. There was a few times early on where things were a bit quiet and i may have missed a line or two (hence me discovering I needed to really crank the audio). Music is there, some of which right up if not from Jack Black’s alley. It’s mostly kind of lumped into a bagel with the acting - cheesy and entertaining, but not always something a person would label as great. For the thinking man, just go somewhere else this time around - it’s got some basic fundamental level of stuff on there as far as family movies go, but you’ll probably struggle if you wanted to right a thesis without trying to dig deeper then the movie feels like it wants.
The master of round.
You know, I think I get the whole “chicken jockey” craze. I feel like that’s the kind of mentality this movie was going for - the thought of people acting like they are three and going ape and trashing the theater still makes me want to do a mass string of sneak attacks about it though. The movie feels like it’s the sort of thing you and a bunch of buddies would put on to some junk food and beers, turn off your brains and have a good time to. Alternatively, I imagine it’d keep those younger folks entertained while their chaperones might groan about over how dumb the movie feels to them. For me, I certainly kept thinking “oh man, this is stupid” - but that doesn’t stop it from being entertaining. I had fun despite having not much less care that I could give about any given character, and really just enjoyed the visuals and the theme park ride of locations and pacing. Mileage will certainly vary on this one, but regardless of one sneaky HBO watermark on a Disney owned streaming service, I still feel a good few people can have fun even if they don’t come out smarter for it.