A staple in video game history hits the big screen 16 years after release. The reign of Minecraft in the video game industry, both current and past eras, seems to be never-ending. So inevitably, a film adaptation of the hit game follows, with Warner Bros. Pictures and director Jared Hess at the helm.

“A Minecraft Movie” stars Jack Black as the iconic Steve, Jason Momoa plays 1989 video game champion Garett Garrison, and Sebastian Eugene Hansen plays Henry, a young boy who struggles to fit in with those around him.

The film follows Henry, Garrison, Henry’s sister Natalie, and friend Dawn as they are sucked through a portal into the place known as the Overworld, a place where you can build whatever your dreams desire, as long as you can build it with cubes. There, they find Overworld expert crafter Steve, and must save the Overworld from a looming threat in order to get back home.

Starting off, a good film must have a simple yet complex plot. There was nothing complex about the story in “A Minecraft Movie”. There are no underlying messages that provoke any further thinking in this film, which makes it feel like such an underwhelming experience. The story in this film is super formulaic and feels reminiscent of movies such as “Jumanji” which made it feel like I was watching a movie I had already seen before. To some casual viewers, this may not seem like a big deal, but I thought this story was severely lacking and recycled. The moviegoing experience felt boring and almost like a waste of time. However, the issue is easily identifiable in that the screenwriters were simply trying to adapt a story that was not existent to adapt.

The video game does not have a linear story to it and is an open-world game where every player creates their own story and tailors their own experience. This is fun when it comes to playing a video game because it is unique, but this becomes a problem when trying to adapt that into a feature-length film. The lack of a linear story in the video game led to the screenwriters picking threads of other successful stories in the film industry and piggybacking off of them, making this film’s story feel unworthy of being told. To add on to the lacking story, the comedy in this film did not land either.

“A Minecraft Movie” overused its comedy leading to a ratio where more jokes ended up not landing than jokes that hit. When this happens in a film, the comedy starts to feel like an annoyance, and Black and Momoa’s characters caused this feeling in the film. Some jokes were funnier than others but this film did not have any groundbreaking comedy that will have any real impact. But even if Momoa and Black were not the best at making jokes, their acting did not lack nearly as much.

Black was the most obvious standout in the film. His character was the only human character in this film that is adapted from the game, and not an original character. But, in the game, Steve is simply a skin for the user to wear, not a character with any backstory. This meant that the interpretation of Steve was left completely up to Black and the team behind this film, and I think they did a good job at making Steve a likable character. Momoa also played his character well, which means he was good at being annoying for the nearly 2-hour runtime. The arrogant video game champion Momoa plays makes the viewer want to slap some sense into him and hurt his ego, which is exactly what Momoa was trying to achieve with this character. The main stars of this film do a good job, but the same can not be said about the side characters.

There were a lot of underdeveloped characters and storylines in this film. The two most underdeveloped were Natalie and Dawn, and this was because they were the characters with the least amount of screentime and were sidelined for most of the important events in the film. This made their characters feel like they did not earn a big payoff in the end of the film because they did not contribute as much to the film as characters like Henry and Garrison did. The same thing goes with Jennifer Coolidge’s character, who is just a sidelined gag that is revisited every 30 minutes or so for a quick quip, with no payoff in the end. However, even with the shortage of a good story and side characters, the visuals in this film were outstanding for the most part.

The set design and CGI in “A Minecraft Movie” was amazing. The blocky world of the video game is perfectly encaptured in this film. The video game has a very unique look to it because it is completely square, and besides the human characters and human world, this film nails the visual look of “Minecraft”. Even the monsters and other animals such as the villagers, the piglins, and the chickens looked extremely similar to the video game version, just a little more life-like and fluid. The other elements of the game such as crafting and mining were also explored to a good extent. This was satisfying because the art style of the game is very fun to watch, and so it was cool to see that translated so well into a live-action film. However, the human characters sometimes looked weird on the sets. The green screen scenes did not feel fluid sometimes and looked as though the characters were not standing in the setting where they should look to be standing. The lighting on the characters also felt off at times, especially on the character’s hair, but these nitpicks do not set the film back as much as other issues.

All in all, “A Minecraft Movie” proves that not all video games need big-screen adaptations. This movie will be a fun watch for families and younger children who are fans of the game, and lifelong fans of the game should still give the film a watch. But, this movie is very much a one-time watch, even if there are a few funny quotables. 

 This film scores 2/5 stars from me.