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| Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures |
A Minecraft Movie, starring Jason Momoa, Emma Myers, and Jack Black, is the big screen adaptation of the popular video game. It will be in theaters on April 3, 2025.
The wait is huge. For some time now, the adaptation of the video game has been one of the most prestigious frontiers for American commercial cinema, but it is not just that. Considering the cultural appeal and the success with the public, it is natural that the expectations raised by the film adaptation of Minecraft were particularly high. A Minecraft Movie, directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite), arrives in Italian theaters on April 3, 2025, for Warner Bros. Pictures Italia. Starring Jack Black, Jason Momoa, Emma Myers, Sebastian Hansen and Danielle Brooks, this cinema for children (not for the whole family), proud to be so, promises adventure, color, imagination in power and devilish rhythms. He promises but doesn't keep much. Among the Italian voices, there is also Mara Maionchi.
A Minecraft Movie: Escape from reality... towards a much more creative reality
Steve (Jack Black) is unhappy. He tells us about it, starting from his childhood and his curious (but why, then?) passion for mines. Growing up, he finds himself with a job as an employee and no prospects. To rebel against a destiny already written, Steve drops everything and rushes to the nearest mine to make his dream come true. Here, he finds two cubes with prodigious potential that hurl him into the Overworld, a magical digital world in which the normal laws of physics do not apply and where, by manipulating cubic-shaped bricks, it is possible to design reality as one pleases.
Too bad that the Overworld contains a secret passage to the Nether, an infernal kingdom ruled by Malgosha, a cynical and spiteful witch (voiced by Mara Maionchi). Malgosha captures Steve and he arranges to hide the cubes in our world to protect him from the Nether, where he remains a prisoner, sacrificing himself for the common good. This concludes the detailed summary of the first twenty minutes of the film. It was worth reporting it to give an idea of the total, absolute, inescapable lack of subtlety of the story. It is all superimposed, without nuance, without ambiguity. From here on, the others arrive.
And the others are, to begin with, Garrett “Garbage Man” (Jason Momoa), a faded gamer (the best of 1989, but it’s been a while and no one remembers him) looking for a spark that will restart his life; two young people, brother and sister, Natalie (Emma Myers) and Henry (Sebastian Hansen), orphans and looking for a better life and, finally, the real estate agent Dawn (Danielle Brooks). The premise of A Minecraft Movie – which is very thin and that’s a good thing because the rules of engagement of a good story must be dry and perfectly readable – is simple: the Overworld attracts unexpressed, unhappy people with an emptiness inside to fill.
The creativity, the color, the wealth of possibilities of the Overworld, and the common front against the threats of Malgosha should “wake up” the protagonists, force them to take control of their lives, and open up to the imagination but without forgetting the real world and its challenges. It is on the terrain of imagination that the effectiveness of the film and its coherence are measured: A Minecraft Movie, while it sings the praises of creativity, while it exalts the inspiring freedom of dreams opposed to the grayness of reality, manages to construct a form (aesthetic, narrative, thematic, sentimental) that lives up to expectations? In other words, is the film about creativity creative enough? With a few exceptions scattered here and there, the answer, unfortunately, is no.
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| Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures |
A film about imagination, with little imagination
A Minecraft Film is worth, above all, for what it tells us about the state of the art of modern commercial cinema. What is current in the film directed by Jared Hess, what is perfectly in tune with the present, is the almost ideological refusal of subtlety. In the hour and forty minutes or so of duration, there is nothing implied, hidden, or camouflaged. A Minecraft Film is an uninterrupted exposition without further levels of interpretation to complicate its architecture.
Children's cinema, when it works, is special in this: that it speaks to one type of audience (young) to be understood by another (older). It explains to the former what life consists of, but without shocks, reminds adults of what it was like when they were young and makes everyone participate in the emotion, challenges, and feeling of life with its universal language. A Minecraft Film does not have enough arrows at its disposal to establish effective communication with its audience.
Excessive didacticism blocks everything at the level of the premises, turning off the action and adventure, making it static and not very “fiery”, and trivializing the construction of effective psychologies. The keystone of the film should be the love/hate relationship, the slightly crazy friendship between Jack Black and Jason Momoa. They are the big shots, the sources of charisma, and sometimes the story reminds us to let the action and humor flow on the self-deprecating charisma of the two protagonists; Steve and Garrett are two adorable losers, defeated by life and eager to make up for it with their imagination. When the film manages to put them at the center of the scene, there is action, there is childish humor, and there is the spark of the film as it could (should) have been. But it happens in alternating current.
The speech also applies to colleagues. There is not enough meat on the fire in the family trauma (barely hinted at and quickly pushed into a corner) of Sebastian Hansen and Emma Myers, nor is it any better for Danielle Brooks. Perhaps the greatest injustice, A Minecraft Movie inflicts it without even realizing it is the one inflicted on the very talented Jennifer Coolidge (The White Lotus), limited to a secondary storyline quite disconnected from the rest of the story and not entirely closed; her humor, self-deprecating, fragile and a little neurotic, deserved more space.
But this is the problem with A Minecraft Movie: if the moral of the story is the invitation to rediscover the anarchic and liberating force of the imagination to contaminate (and redeem) the boredom of life with a little color and imagination, the film lacks the color and imagination necessary to flavor the action, sketch the characters, model a convincing aesthetic. Even the animation, beyond the meticulously crafted exterior, lacks strength and originality
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| Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures |
A Minecraft Movie: evaluation and conclusion
It remains to be seen whether the combination of a gripping video game and undeniably appealing protagonists will make the public forget the shortcomings – it's a real shame the premises were encouraging – of A Minecraft Movie. Jason Momoa's thunderous self-irony is appreciable, as is the electric and charismatic vitality of Jack Black, who confirms his authority as the Orson Welles – physically imposing and extremely bearded – of contemporary pop culture.
In the film, he also does more than the bare minimum, showing off his usual Luciferian expressiveness and his appreciable singing skills (he is the singer and guitarist of the rock duo Tenacious D). The problems are upstream: a script without imagination – a lethal lack of coherence, given the story – and a direction that is unable to translate it into rhythm and vigor. The lesson is to be kept in mind: the adventure, action and colour of the video game may not be enough. Cinema always needs a good story and good characters. If it has trouble finding them at the source, it must build them itself later. The film has too much faith in the video game and not enough in itself.
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