After almost a decade of development troubles, the Minecraft movie, officially titled “A Minecraft Movie”, has finally been released in theatres and premiered on April 4, 2025. The real question, however, is if the movie is actually good. Surprisingly, that question is a lot harder to answer than one might think.
The film is written so incredibly poorly. Every line of dialogue is stupid and every time a line is said it feels rushed and not complete. It seems as if it was done in one take, which while it is really funny, it also feels messy. In this film there are lines such as “Garrett I trusted you!” and “That’s okay my friend, buckets are useful here” which are such laughably awful lines it’s almost shocking.
The story follows our main protagonist, Henry, played by Sebastian Hansen, as he struggles with fitting in because he is simply too creative. He is joined by his older sister Natalie, played by Emma Myers, who has to take care of Henry after their mom dies. This is a side plot so melodramatic and stupid it’s barely relevant. Henry then meets up with Garrett ‘the garbage man’ Garrison, played by Jason Mamoa, who used to be a world champion gamer and is now washed up, irrelevant, and owns an old video game shop. There is a character named Dawn, played by Danielle Brooks, who doesn’t do anything memorable or funny and just wastes a good performance. And then finally, there’s Steve, played by Jack Black, who serves as the guide through the Minecraft world and its strange rules.
There are more characters, but none of them really get to have much screen time. There is a subplot surrounding Jennifer Coolidge dating a Villager, but even though it’s the funniest part of the whole movie, it only gets 3 scenes total. The main antagonists of the film, ‘the Piglins’, also don’t really get to do much and their motivations, while funny, are flawed as well. Viewers don’t get much time to see them develop.
The visual effects are actually quite good contrary to popular belief. Sure, making the film live action was a weird and probably bad decision, but for what it’s worth, it all looked pretty good. The human characters don’t look super integrated into the world and you can definitely tell that they’re using a green screen a lot of the time, but besides that, the film visually looks good. This is partly in service to the fact that they used many practical props and sets for the film which adds a more realistic touch to the film.
Overall, the film is probably by most regards a ‘bad’ movie which I would be inclined to agree with, but the internal struggle that I’m facing with this movie is that I love this Film so much and I don’t care about its many flaws, and Believe me, the film has many flaws.
The internet’s reaction to the movie has been insane, with people going ballistic in the theaters over Jack Black saying the awful dialogue in a serious tone such as “Chicken Jockey” and “I…Am Steve.” This movie is already almost crossing 1 Billion Dollars simply because people are making memes of this movie. The critics are obviously tearing this movie apart but that doesn’t really matter because at the same time the fans are lifting this movie up.
The movie is directed by Jared Hess, who has made films such as ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ and ‘Nacho Libre’ which are very fundamentally unserious films. Therefore, I think that is the reason ‘A Minecraft Movie’ is also very unserious. In the first 5 minutes of the film, we immediately pick up the unserious tone as Jack Black starts spewing out exposition at a million miles an hour. The movie is quite literally telling you to turn your brain off and just accept the film for what it is. And if you do that, I can quite confidently say that you will enjoy the movie to its fullest.
