By Todd Russell
On Saturday afternoon we took our two grandchildren to see the new Minecraft movie. There were four adults and two children plus concessions and the experience at AMC ran $178. These were the matinee discounted ticket price, btw, it would have cost the six of us over $200 with concessions.
Should have led off this article with I don’t play Minecraft. I’ve seen it played by our grandkids, but it’s never been a game that caught my interest. And I do like some crafting games a lot, just haven’t ever gotten into this one. So, going into this movie with limited knowledge of what to expect. Didn’t read any reviews of it although I could see by the advance tickets sales that a lot of the theaters were filling up. People are checking this out.
Jack Black plays Steve, the miner, caught in a Minecraft world. The first twenty minutes of the movie is Black’s character telling us everything we need to know about how he got in trouble. It’s not a great way to start any movie, in full on exposition mode and then Steve disappears for quite some time and we follow a brother and sister along with a very strange role for Jason Momoa as an 80s gamer that runs a failing videogame shop. Momoa takes turns dueling Jack Black for who can over-emphasize their lines the most. Clearly these guys went to the William Shatner school of over-accentuating-your-lines-like-this-with-increased-volume.
The movie wasn’t terrible, but I wouldn’t call it good. I think you have to be on something or a child to understand what’s going on. If you think about the plot too much, which really simplified is the quest for an item in a world where pigs with square, blocky faces are the antagonist. It’s not a movie I’ll be seeing again but it wasn’t as bad as I worried it might be. There wasn’t a lot of cheering, laughter or excitement from the movie audience we were a part of and our grandchildren wouldn’t say one way or the other if they liked it. I’d give this 2 out of 5 stars on my 5-star rating scale. I think it just tried wayyyyy too hard to be as good as Super Mario Bros. movie, including adding Jack Black, but the problem is Nintendo has so many different iconic characters to populate the world that Minecraft simply doesn’t have. Steve? Um, no.
For those that do like games like Minecraft, oh my, there are a ton of Minecraft-like games out there. A few simple searches led me to a bunch of free alternatives like: Miniblox via Crazy Games: https://www.crazygames.com/game/miniblox
Do you play Minecraft? Share your experience with the game in the comments. Are you planning on seeing the movie? If so, when? In the theater, waiting for it on streaming?