A Minecraft Movie works for the audience it is built for

Friday, 4 April 2025

A Minecraft Movie (PG, 101 mins) Directed by Jared Hess ***½

Sometimes my job is made very easy for me. This Thursday was one of those times. The earliest screening of A Minecraft Movie I could get to was a 3.45pm session at one of my favourite Wellington locals, which was otherwise mostly empty. So I settled in, enjoyed the trailers - the live-action How To Train Your Dragon looks fantastic - and waited for the film to start.

And just as it did, the doors flew open and a gang of 10 or so boys came tumbling in. I reckon they were all around 13 years old, and they had run to the movie as soon as school was out. And for the next 101 minutes they hooted, laughed, role-played lines from the Minecraft game and loudly voiced their approval - or not - of everything that was happening on screen.

I asked them to chill out once, when it seemed like a brawl was about to erupt and the small family group sitting in front were looking anxious. But mostly I thought they were brilliant company, and their presence told me everything I needed to know about the film.

Minecraft - the game - is a near-infinite landscape players can inhabit in different ways. They can head off on journeys and battle weird mobs of zombies and assorted other nasties. Or they can stay put and concentrate on building and bartering their way to a great virtual life. Players can work alone, but more often groups will collaborate and play together. Minecraft is - as I've been learning today - an online world that could just about restore your faith in humanity.

Minecraft is also the best selling video game of all time, with nearly 170,000,000 regular players world-wide. And that makes me quite happy.

To turn Minecraft into a movie, director Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) and a team of writers - including Allison Schroeder, who wrote Frozen 2 - have taken the path of least resistance. By simply recycling the age-old story-line about a group from the outside world finding a portal into an alternative universe, and then using that as a chassis to hold a series of set-pieces about putting that world to rights, and maybe trying to save this one at the same time.

In no particular order A Minecraft Movie reminded me of The Wizard of Oz, The Lego Movie, Tron, The Chronicles of Narnia, Jumanji, Stargate and about a dozen others. But, those are all great films, in their way, and I reckon A Minecraft Movie can sit happily alongside them.

So yes, a small gang of everyday people - teenagers Henry and Natalie, their friend Dawn and a guy called Garrett who runs a video game shop - find the key to the world of Minecraft, they travel there, and they meet the mythical Steve, who has been living in this parallel reality for years and can show them the ropes.

What follows is a dizzying production line of increasingly bonkers and indulgent set- pieces, as the crew head out to retrieve some magical doohickey that will let them travel home. But the mechanics - and what we are laughingly going to call the plot - don't really matter at all. All that counts here is how inventive the film-making is, and how entertainingly A Minecraft Movie gets across the screen.

And the answer - if my gang of schoolboys is to be trusted - is pretty darned well.

The big names on the poster are Jason Momoa (Aquaman) and Jack Black. We know Black can do this stuff superbly, because we've seen him in Jumanji and Gulliver's Travels, and Momoa has been quietly dropping killer comic timing into his roles for years. Around that pair, Emma Myers (Wednesday), Sebastian Hansen and Danielle Brooks (Orange is the New Black) are more than fine - and Kate McKinnon, Jemaine Clement and Jennifer Coolidge are as solid as you would expect in supporting roles.

A Minecraft Movie mostly does exactly what you are hoping it will. A lot of the jokes land - and a few of them are genuinely funny. The visuals, world building, music and songs are all pretty excellent. And the early - real-world - scenes of the film are mostly shot in and around Huntly, about an hour south of Auckland. Which made me laugh harder than anything else has all week.

A Minecraft Movie is a noisy, funny, good-natured mess of a film. If it is something you want to see, then I think you'll probably like it just fine.

A Minecraft Movie is in cinemas now.