‘A Minecraft Movie’ Dreadfully Misunderstands Its Source Material

Let’s rip the bandaid off now: A Minecraft Movie is certainly one of the worst films to be given a theatrical release in recent memory, and of the 2020s so far.

Any film based on Minecraft, a famously storyless game with practically limitless creative potential, would already have struggled to widely appeal to everyone. Thus, A Minecraft Movie boldly asks the question “What if we appealed to nobody?” It certainly won’t be of interest to non-Minecraft fans, given the ugliness of its uncanny world and insipid attempt at a narrative.

But even for Minecraft fans, this is a bastardised vision of the game that they love. Barely even attempting to replicate what people like about this uber-popular game, A Minecraft Movie is a transparently cynical attempt to justify your ticket purchase by name-dropping things from the game for shallow fan service, sacrificing pesky things movies usually need like “an engaging story” or “fun characters” in the process.

Objectively speaking, A Minecraft Movie tells the tale of four people – two siblings, an aging video game prodigy and a real-estate agent/petting zoo owner – who find themselves teleported to the Overworld, recognisable as the cube-heavy world of Minecraft. There, they meet Steve (Jack Black), another human who has lived in the Overworld for some time as they try to return home while stopping a new threat arising from the hellish realm of The Nether.

A Minecraft Movie falters immediately

The start of the movie’s problems conveniently coincide with the beginning of the movie, as Steve gives us his backstory. Jack Black seems to be having fun as Steve, in this utterly baffling performance. He delivers each line with faux-gusto that sounds as if he were doing a spoken word version of a Tenacious D. Maybe it’s Black’s attempt for Steve being a total non-character whose only real purpose is exposition.

Jason Momoa provides an even more head-scratching performance as Garrett Garrison, a washed-up pro gamer whose retro store is going out of business. Garrett is clearly meant to be comic relief, though none of the jokes written for him are even remotely entertaining. Meanwhile, Momoa feels like he’s there for the check.

Things are slightly better with orphaned siblings Natalie and Henry, played by Emma Myers and Sebastian Hansen, who are the closest thing to an emotional centre the film has. Danielle Brooks as Dawn has very little to do despite her main cast, and Jennifer Coolidge makes a fairly brief appearance in the film as Henry’s school principal and provides the most “laughs” of the film, in direct spite of the script she’s working with.

You realise pretty early on that A Minecraft Movie is your bog-standard blockbuster adventure where the heroes have to get the MacGuffin before the bad guys use it to open up a laser in the sky with no deeper themes to mine for. I would call the script utilitarian, but that implies a level of function the film lacks.

In an act of synthesis, the movie looks as bad as it’s written: combining the iconic blocky art style of Minecraft with uncomfortable photorealism, it all looks even more uncanny contrasted with the human actors in the movie clearly standing on a greenscreen.

One of the worst films of 2025 so far

This aesthetic, and Jack Black’s many lines simply saying the name of something from the source material, are the only things that tie A Minecraft Movie to the game it’s based on. Opting for cheap references and irony-poisoned TikTok lingo in place of anything remotely substantive, A Minecraft Movie doesn’t even attempt to encapsulate what so captures people about Minecraft.

Though it means something different to everyone, a common thread to people’s experiences with Minecraft is its escapist element that can make people feel like fearless adventurers, master architects or anything else they want. I think there is a version of this movie that could explore that escapist fantasy, and how we can carry the creativity we learn from it into the real world.

A Minecraft Movie has no interest in creativity though, and barely any in Minecraft. Rather, its desires lie in getting its audience to pay money for a ticket to see a movie because it has Minecraft in the title, and clearly cares very little about the ensuing film. This means A Minecraft Movie isn’t just terrible: it’s fundamentally rotten to the core.

½

A Minecraft Movie is in cinemas now.