"Minecraft the Movie" Should Make Anyone Divest of Their Microsoft Holdings

This is one of the year's worst movies

Going to “Minecraft the Movie” at my local theater was something like an atheist observing a Catholic Mass who had never heard of God or church before.

People kept talking back to the screen, saying lines from the movie as if they had seen it before. When Minecraft objects appeared on screen, they said their names aloud.

And when Jack Black appeared on screen to say, “Hello, I’m Steve,” in unison dozens of people said “I’m Steve” at the same time.

Was there a formal liturgy I didn’t know about? Was this a worship experience? How does one get ingrafted into this spiritual denomination?

I don’t know if this audience had seen the trailer a thousand times, had pirated the movie and watched it beforehand, or if Minecraft the game has its in-group sayings.

No matter: this movie found its audience.

Unfortunately, it is for no one else. To be judgmental, the list of this 100-minute-long advertisement’s “cinema sins” would go on well past a list of ten commandments.

“Minecraft the Movie,” from what I can tell, is all gamer-fulfillment experience. Plot and character are just accoutrements. The gamers who create their own solipsistic, 8-bit block worlds are uniting here, to see their universes reflected to them cinematically.

“Minecraft” is of course one of the most commercially successful artists achievements ever. This is no exaggeration: 300 million-plus copies sold. Microsoft, one of the “Magnificent Seven,” bought its parent company for $2.5 billion over a decade ago. If you own an S&P index fund, you likely own a tiny little bit of Minecraft itself.

That stake in this commercial product means the movie doubly functions as an ad.

Jack Black, the “star,” knows this: he acts as if he’s being stupid in a Verizon commercial for the sake of selling phones.

He’s Steve, the default male character in the game Minecraft. But in the movie, the Overworld, the name of Minecraft’s sandbox universe, is an alterative universe which you access through a literal mineshaft in Idaho.

In the 1980s, Steve gets lost in this Overworld, imprisoned by evil pig-creatures for decades. Meanwhile, four characters of no importance find a blue cube that gives them access to the mine.

They go in, they lose part of the cube, they must find a substitute cube to get out. That is the plot.

Along the way they meet and rescue Steve, master of the Overworld, who’s built and mined so well that he’s the god of his own self-contained world.

I never comment on actors, since they are at the mercy of greater forces, such as directors and editors, but Jack Black here deserves comment. He seems to have walked on the set with any piece of clothing and hairstyling he wanted. He plays no character, instead hamming things up in his own special way so that he’s overtly mocking the film.

That the church-going crowd didn’t notice this boggles my mind. It’s as if the priest leading the service hated Christianity, yet the faithful loved him still.

If you know Black’s antics from other films, they may be at their worst here. I must add, whenever I notice a possible best/worst ever in cinema, that Black’s beard that he sports may be the grossest beard featured most prominently in any movie I can ever remember. Was he in charge of his own hair style? Or is “gross dad-beard” now in fashion amongst gamers?

Truly, I partly admire what Black is doing here. In a world of extreme vanity that knows no bounds, which is Hollywood, Black evidences absolutely no vanity at all. His schtick with Jason Momoa amounts to acting like a cool idiot to Momoa’s moronic beefcake. They have no chemistry. This is one of the worst buddy-comedy pairs I have ever seen. My guess is, again, that Black just doesn’t care about how he appears.

The movie sins with its bad acting, borrowed and scattered plot, CGI that at times looks like 1950s back-projection, and extreme telegraphing of all “jokes.” It’s possible I won’t see a worse movie this decade.

And yet I was captivated. The audience turned my experience into a sociological experiment in miniature. How and why were they transfixed and chatty? How did they know the lines?

I was an alien observing a tribe of unified humans; one thing you can say about these people is that they weren’t lonely at all.

They had bonded together around a brand. Together they sat around its blocky temple, with the round Black leading them to a vision of infinite squares.