‘A Minecraft Movie’ (2025) Review - A Giant F*ck You to All the Artists

There is a scene in Louis Leterrier's Fast X where Jason Momoa's Dante decorates a corpse by painting his toenails. In a pinkish bathrobe and double buns, the character looks like daddy's little princess. Momoa again embraces this inner softness in A Minecraft Movie, directed by Jared Hess. With a pink jacket and an attitude that says, "I appear tough from the outside, but I am actually fragile, so handle me with care," Momoa, as Garrett "The Garbage Man" Garrison, looks like a fluffy teddy bear. He brings a comic mood to a film that, without him, would feel cheerless. The jokes mainly don't land, which is why you need someone like Momoa's Garrett to project an illusion of merriment. A Minecraft Movie also gets its charge from Jack Black. Black flails his arms puts extra stress on his lines, and makes funny faces with such fervor that it seems as if his life depends on splitting your sides. Momoa and Black give the film its only source of energy, which is why A Minecraft Movie becomes stale and boring very quickly. Emma Myers, who was incredibly sweet and charming on Wednesday, is incredibly wasted. Danielle Brooks is almost forgettable, and Sebastian Hansen is just there. Even Jennifer Coolidge fails to add spice to a rotten role, a rotten material. As soon as you get tired of Momoa and Black, A Minecraft Movie falls into the pit of dreariness.

There is a lot of conversation nowadays about AI's impact on artists and their future. Many people have criticized the new Ghibli trend, which is that any image, through OpenAI's ChatGPT, can be converted into a Studio Ghibli frame. Creativity requires hard work, commitment, and discipline. An artist, a writer, or a filmmaker spends hours coming up with an original creation. So if a person merely provides a few prompts to a software, which in turn plagiarizes someone's invention, can you call them an artist, an expert, or a genius? Your answer will determine your reaction to Hess's comedy adventure. This is, after all, a film that considers all those Grok and ChatGPT users to be creators. In A Minecraft Movie, characters build houses, fortresses, weapons - basically everything - by just swinging their hands. They take a small cube, throw it on the ground, and its size increases. On a worktable, they arrange cubes and other objects (like a shoe that has wings) in a pattern to create swords, buckets, and soldiers. I can't say I completely understood the rules of creation, but one thing that's evident is that the act of creation itself is rendered simplistic and effortless. The characters who make architecture, or anything for that matter, don't look different from those people who generate poems and pictures through AI tools and software. Instead of writing prompts, they throw objects or arrange them in specific patterns. Still, both these actions feel the same. For a movie that aims to celebrate creativity and imaginative individuals, A Minecraft Movie comes across as a giant fuck you to all the artists who give their lives to their art, to their passion.

Ignore all the discussion regarding AI and artists, and A Minecraft Movie still seems like an insult to our intelligence. The story is told with an air of nonchalance as if the filmmakers are sure the audience won't ask questions. For instance, how can Steve (Black) be the first person to discover those cube thingies in the mines? Or forget that, who placed those cube thingies there? How can the zombies of the Overworld have such a terrible aim that they are unable to hit Garrett when he falls into a pit? They are worse than Stormtroopers. A villager from the Overworld enters the real world through a portal, and no one is shocked by his appearance? Vice Principal Marlene (Coolidge) goes to a restaurant with him, and neither she nor the other customers is surprised to see this strange creature. How is that possible? We know that humans are unfamiliar with the creatures of the Overworld. Myers and Brooks are taken aback when they first see the villagers. Hence, Marlene's and everybody else's casual reaction in the real world makes zero sense. If A Minecraft Movie is made for children, I will just say that the filmmakers have underestimated children. Kids are extremely curious and make sense of the world by asking questions. It's the tired, unimaginative adults who shoot down their queries and slowly kill their inquisitiveness. One day, these adults make something like A Minecraft Movie or generate AI Ghibli images.

Final Score- [2/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times