The “A Minecraft Movie” movie is a good movie. It is very different from what was advertised. The exact thing you think it’s going to be when you watch the trailer, is what it is, but it is also something more than that.

The movie speaks a strange language, that is both film language, internet language, and something genuine, in a way that is very hard to disentangle and take apart. It’s ironic about being a movie, being a certain kind of movie.

It’s ironic about being a video game movie, and it’s especially ironic about being “a Minecraft movie”. But despite that it is not insincere. underneath the obtuse mix of film-language and irony, there is a surprisingly coherent and honest voice of sincerity.

The film opens with Jack Black doing an ironic movie voice-over, explaining how he became the “Steve” character. It is drenched in irony, exactly as you expect it would:

he references the internet meme of “children yearn for the mines”, he does his Jack Black thing of screamtalking and STRESSing random sylLABles while making a goofy face. His life story is, he was a loser and unhappy, and then he went to minecraft world and had fun.

It goes on a little too long to set up the basic film(tm) plotline for later in the movie, with a evil witch and a mcguffin and some movie stuff to do later.

But after this introduction, when he sends the mcguffin to earth to be found by the main character, the movie’s language changes. It is no longer gen x nihilism, or millennial irony after Jack Black is put in prison in hell, and we change protagonist to Young Zoomer Henry.

The reason the movie resonates with the Zoomers is because it reflects their own life experience back at them, and they pick up on that in a subconscious way even if they can’t articulate it.

The real plot of the movie is that a boy is SUCKED against his will into a RECTANGULAR PORTAL into a world that is HYPER STIMULATING and OVERSATURATED, where the people he meet tells him it is a beautiful world of “creativity”,

but it’s actually a really simplistic world of base Id expression and Id satisfaction,

Fuck wrong picture I mean

No sorry my bad I mean

And the person telling him all this, singing (literally) the praises of “creativity”, spinning a yarn about how in the real world, creativity is punished and you are bullied for being “creative”,

but in the magical Minecraft alternative dimension world, you can just <cum forever> I mean express yourself by building houses. Don’t think too hard about how every time you “put down a block” is make a pleasant “plop” sound and it’s clearly stimulating,

as every character is expressing extreme joy and the *act* of putting down each block. Not the “creative” part of planning out a project or solving a project, but the mere mechanical task of clicking the button. Anyways the guy telling you all that looks like this:

A fat, slovenly, unwashed, annoying manchild, who is exactly the opposite of what he claims to worship. Jack Blacks character is pure Id expression, because that’s the only thing Jack Black does. He’s childish and base and vulgar, and takes childish pleasure in base things.

The good news is, the movie is in on the joke. The spectacular news is, I don’t think Jack Black is. Either he isnt, or he is a much better actor than I give him credit for,

because the whole thing relies on him being himself, and the movie is, on both a literal reading level, and on a meta-interactive-internet level, making fun of Jack Black, both the role Steve and the Actor Jack.

In many other movies like this, this would have been a director with contempt for his audience, but that is not at all what A Minecraft movie does. This is just contempt for Jack Black, and the audience is welcomed to take part in it.

On a literal plot level, the antagonist of the movie is some witch pig lady. But on an emotional level, Steve is a villain, the shadow of the protagonist of the movie.

The main character Henry is a genuinely creative and smart kid. This is illustrated by him being able to draw well, and being a literal math genius, who can engineer a functioning rocket from scratch.

Jack Black is a “Creative”, which is illustrated by him making silly faces and yelling random nonsense

(This scene literally happens in the movie. Jack black has made a Creative People Chicken Oven, where he roasts chickens with lava)

When Henry and the other cast of characters are stuck in minecraft world, they are not actually aided by Steve. They are told that they are, he tells them they are, but at no point in the movie does he ever really help them out of a situation he didnt cause -

in fact the whole reason they are stuck in there is Steve’s fault in the first place, for sending the McGuffin to earth. The only act of real creative thinking, in the plot, is near the end when Henry uses a gun he made to utilize a teleportation spell, to shoot it to where

The formal villain of the movie is Malgosha, an evil Witch, who’s backstory is that she was ridiculed by her pig society for wanting to be an expressionist dancer, and so she swore to destroy all “creativity”

(that’s the word they use in the movie, over and over), forever, while committing to her culture’s goal of maximizing gold mining. She wants to invade minecraft world to mine their gold and destroy all creativity.

But in this, she is more of a shadow of Steve than of Henry. Henry is never seriously confronted with giving up on his abilities. But Steve’s “creativity” is exactly the same as Malgosha: autistic grinding of some arbitrary resource.

And despite her being “the evil witch who forswore Creativity”, she is a magical witch, who has grand plans and schemes, and she even created a weird giant Frankenstein’s monster pig that can shoot laser beams.

Seems pretty creative to me! But it is not, of course, “Creative”. Steve, the poster child of “CREATIVITY”, only wears blue shirts - the movie makes multiple jokes hammering this down.