After several years of waiting, a movie about “Minecraft” has finally arrived.
It was memed to death before it even released, and it made $313 million globally on its opening weekend. That does not inherently mean it’s a piece of peak cinema.
The opening of “A Minecraft Movie” describes the backstory of one of the protagonists, Steve.
A lot of the popular quotes from the trailers are in these first five minutes. It’s a fine opening and backstory. It serves its purpose.
The rest of the opening, up until the characters go into “Minecraft,” is all right. The characters are tropey, and a lot of the comedy comes from that.
Overall, the contents of the movie were acceptable and can be fun if you don’t think too hard about it. However, there were a number of problems.
The first problem with “A Minecraft Movie” is the fact that it was live action at all. “Minecraft” lends itself extremely well to 3D animation — to the point where, sometimes, things like music videos use “Minecraft”-style animation while not being related to it at all.
Additionally, the live-action “Minecraft” animals were uncanny. Instead of keeping everything simple, they were all rendered with actual fur and, in the villagers’ cases, flesh textures. It was at best weird and at worst creepy.
The filming itself felt off a lot of the time. There were many spots with weird or boring shots and/or a very visible green screen. Additionally, the nighttime effect was cheap and didn’t look very good.
There were also a staggering number of inaccuracies between the game and the movie. A lot of it looked like it was made to feel like “Minecraft” rather than actually be true to it. Several structures ignored in-game blocks and how they actually worked — mainly stairs.
Even though they had someone who plays “Minecraft” for a living to oversee the in-game mechanics, they still deviated from the actual game.
All in all, if you are looking for mindless fun, “A Minecraft Movie” can serve that purpose. However, all the problems stacked up a little too much for me.
