Archive / Ramblings / A Minecraft Movie (4/6/2025)

A review of A Minecraft Movie, from a longtime Minecraft player.

In my youth, much of my free time was spent on my PS2 and PS2, going through my collection of games both new and old. Standing high among these was Minecraft's now abandoned Legacy Console Edition, a game I cherish dearly. Tens of hundreds of hours spent on my vast Creative Mode superflat worlds, builds stretching across the horizon. I built essentially everything possible. Houses, pixel art, redstone contraptions, shamelessly stolen tutorials. Everything I was made of was put into those worlds. Even now I can visualize all of them perfectly in my mind. They were the most important thing in the world to me. Even when not in those worlds, I would be playing through the console exclusive Battle Minigames with my brother.

But now, that is all in the past. All but the first of those worlds were accidentally deleted long ago. Legacy Console Edition and its minigames have been dead since 2018. I haven't played the game seriously in years. I still keep up with the updates, and know most things about the game, but... the spark is gone.

Can this movie possibly live up to these feelings?

...absolutely not.

But perhaps it can give me a laugh or two.

["Awsomeness 1.0" [sic] circa 2015]

The characters of this movie are... flat. Most of them get little actual development and aren't presented with all that much depth. I think they all work well enough for their intended roles, but there should really still be more.

Henry and Natalie are about the same in quality. There is some character development, and they work well with the other characters I suppose.

Garrett is a fine enough character. He isn't particularly deep, but he plays off the others (especially Steve) well.

Dawn is honestly just entirely purposeless and really didn't need to be in the movie. Her presence doesn't make the movie any worse but it doesn't help either.

Steve is probably the best character, not that he is particularly incredible. He is somewhat more fleshed out than the rest and is pretty much the only one pushing the plot forward.

Malgosha is a functional villain, at least. She has little depth but at least acts as a genuine threat.

I think part of the problem is just in the runtime. Maybe if the movie went on for a bit longer, they could have fleshed them out just a bit more.

The plot is honestly decent overall. It isn't especially complex, but there is something. I think it takes just a bit too long for them to get into the overworld, but after that it goes pretty well until they get out of the mansion. From there the plot goes way too fast. Even an extra ten minutes or so would have helped it greatly.

Impossible to judge, honestly. I have a stupid sense of humor that enjoys most jokes regardless of their actual quality (as long as there is some substance to them at least) so I really don't know how to rank it. It also helped that the audience at the theater was cheering along with any of the stupid jokes (ESPECIALLY chicken jockey), so the environment was perfect to just laugh at it. I wouldn't really catagorize it as "so bad it's good" but I wouldn't call it good either...

Overall quite accurate to the game! I expected them to make up a lot more. Obviously stuff like the tater tot gun is fake but nothing feels insanely out of place.

Suprisingly, I think they actually work really well! Genuinely, it looks really good. There are times where stuff goes a bit more off model than I would like, but the Minecraft world as a whole was really well done. The early trailers did not do it justice honestly.

I feel like this movie was made in the opposite order as every other movie. It feels like the setpieces were made first, and then they strung them together with a plot. I can't say it was good in any objective way, but it was enjoyable to watch on some level. The weak points are absolutely the plot and characters. The visuals and game accuracy are the strong points. The humor is somewhere in the middle. In the end, on my completely arbitrary ranking scale, I give it a...

68 / 100

What does that mean? Who knows. At least I got the laugh I wanted.