From eighth grade to freshman year of college I was an avid Minecraft player. I still associate the word ‘hoe’ with the farming implement far more than its current meaning of sex worker specifically because of all the hours I spent building overly convoluted wheat farms as well as automated beef farms using netherrack as a gigantic grill. I was also a fan of monumental architecture and scheming against my friends and having labyrinthine politics that irritated my sister. As such, A Minecraft Movie was a homecoming for me, like seeing an old friend for the first time in a decade.
I admit I went into the theater wanting to see some chaos, the flying popcorn and the live chicken in the theater. The worst of what I saw was some teenagers yelling along to the memetic lines, about Steve and chicken jockeys, but nothing truly anarchic (or physically harmful, as befell one showing in Rhode Island). But it did feel right, being in a movie such as this with younger folks (as of writing I am 28, not the flower of youth but not decrepit either), looking upon this bonanza with the eyes of children in all their ability to see the newness and excitement in everything.
A Minecraft Movie is not high cinema, but nobody expected it to be. It is very colorful, filled with jokes that are allusions to the game or to memes or are otherwise very goofy, and very, very quippy. It has two actors who are clearly what the studio is hoping will draw in viewers not familiar with the game. It is filled to the brim with CGI, as was inevitable given the nature of what it is adapting. It has a frankly forgettable villain, as well as side characters who are never really given the time to really shine like those of Jack Black and Jason Momoa do. There are moments designed to go viral, as they have.
But despite all of that I can’t call this movie a bad one. The end result is legitimately very funny; I guffawed several times, such as when Jason Momoa takes a look at the world of MineCraft and declares that the party is now in Wyoming (the town in the real world where these characters are from is in Idaho - making it the second time in recent memory a video game adaptation has selected a town in that region of the United States to introduce the real world to the game, following Green Hills, Montana, in the recent Sonic the Hedgehog movies). The action scenes take advantage of the setting, and make it thrilling. The setting itself is rendered lushly, a blocky world nevertheless inhabited. It is a movie that, despite all the cubes, feels plausible within its particular constraints.
In terms of the nitty-gritty thematic aspects, there is one throughline that I find to be very interesting. Much of this movie is about escape; everyone in this movie is fleeing something, usually in Idaho. Steve, Jack Black’s rendition of the original player character in the game, is fleeing the drudgery of white collar life. Jason Momoa’s character is escaping the implosion of his career and the loss of his livelihood. The two children who serve as surrogates for the young audience are escaping the loss of their mother, and the last of the humans is escaping the drudgery of the gig economy. Like many movies involving portals to other worlds, the film’s narrative ultimately endorses returning to the real world, to stop avoiding your problems and to make something of your life.
This was the basic plot of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, and many other movies like it. This acquires a new valence, however, when you consider that the film is of course based on an escapist video game. For me, and for many other people like me, that world of cubes was a welcome escape from reality. As Ursula K. Le Guin famously said (and as been quoted endlessly thereafter):
“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
Furthermore there is a certain implication here, a very capitalist implication at that, that bases human worth on productivity. What about the people who, for one reason or another, cannot accomplish great things in the real world, or only can at great cost. What does this philosophy say about the impoverished or the time-impoverished, the disabled, or the people who, for one reason or another, cannot be bent into tools for productivity? This philosophy would condemn them for going to a place, if only on a hard drive, where they can find contentment and actualization. It is a message with the ethos of a labor camp, and it has irritated me in every film I have seen it in.
Can we blame the kid who is mocked at his school for wanting to escape? Can we blame the woman whose every waking moment is sacrificed to the gig economy? The message, digging down into it (no pun intended) is a very puritan one, a sense that idle hands are the devil’s work. But they’re not doing nothing in the land of blocks; they are building, creating, bonding. That is what human beings are supposed to do, evolutionarily, not grinding away to make other people richer. As much as this film tries to make this message sound like hardheaded realism, it only ever makes the real world sound like a panopticon. The truth is, not everyone can succeed if they put their mind to it, and that is the ultimate fallacy of the film’s ending.
A Minecraft Movie ends up feeling like it loves the aesthetic of the game and the emotions evoked by the game, but not the purpose of playing the game. This is in opposition to the recent Jumanji movies, which deeply understood the human desire for escape. Here, I think it wasn’t so much a conscious decision to do so as much as it was bolting on the expected ending and calling it a day. It wasn’t something I noticed in the theater, but after ruminating on it afterward. The movie itself is entertaining on a surface level, but breaking it down the whole thing feels cynical in a way most blockbusters don’t.
--
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
