A Minecraft Movie delivers fast-paced fun for kids, Jack Black energy, and pixel-perfect fan service—but sacrifices depth for dopamine-fueled simplicity.

Alongside The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Pokemon, what could be the other huge license to adapt other than Minecraft? Given that Grand Theft Auto has practically already been adapted for the past 10 years by Fast and Furious, it was a certainty that the cubic world of Minecraft would one day find its way into cinemas. At the same time, who could blame Warner’s executive producers for trying? A license worth billions and played by millions of mostly young players, and a huge open world like a blank page open to anything.

After all, Minecraft, like Lego, can be whatever you want it to be, and Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess understands this. A Minecraft Movie doesn’t waste a second in its first act to introduce character Steve (Jack Black), the Overworld and evil Malgosha (Rachel House). Hess makes every concession to writing and plot logic in his exposition to introduce us to the characters who find themselves unwillingly in the Overworld, Garrett “The Garbage Man” (Jason Momoa), little Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen) as well as Natalie (Emma Myers) and Dawn (Danielle Brooks). While Steve, Garrett and Henry will get a few moments of in-depth development, Natalie and Dawn will have to make do with two scenes each for their characters, as apparently nobody has time for them.

Inevitably for a video game adaptation clearly targeted at children coming from a Major Studio, A Minecraft Movie is incredibly surface-level in both its characters and its storytelling. The team must reach a dangerous territory to retrieve the container of a magic cube so that it can return home, while facing hordes of Malgosha’s zombie pigs along the way. Fascinatingly enough, watching the countless conflict resolutions and writing facilities becomes almost a game in itself. Each sequence relies on the characters arriving at a location, presenting a problem, and resolving it almost immediately, often without much difficulty. This makes the film extremely easy and digestible to engage with (especially for children who can follow the film as a straight line of individual problems/resolutions). Is this a hell of a way to infantilize its audience in an offensive way in order to get a film that can easily chart its course at the box office? Probably, but you have to admit in the flip side that Warner, Hess and the screenwriters can pat themselves on the back for devising such a diabolically effective script against an audience with a dwindling attention span. Some might say it’s sad to have to sacrifice every aspect of the script and story in order to keep kids entertained, others might argue that if this is to be the way to keep cinema relevant to a new generation and ensure they keep coming back to it when they’re older, it must be one of the prices to pay.

But it has to be said that the editing of A Minecraft Movie is one of the film’s driving forces, that and Jack Black’s and Jason Momoa’s performances playing the game to the hilt and, by extension, making the film far more enjoyable to watch, even if it means an incredible number of lines shouted in front of a blue screen. Returning to the editing, Hess manages to create a marvellous dopamine machine by never letting his film rest, always moving from right to left and from sequence to sequence like a well-oiled handover. Fortunately, the editing is there to help us forget the sterility of the direction, which is very much like a blank page. Apart from a few camera movements during fights, there’s clearly nothing interesting to be seen in terms of color, traveling or anything else that might add a little personality.

From a corporate/producer point of view, A Minecraft Movie totally fulfills its contract, covering every aspect, creature and object known to the game. It wins the sympathy of those who consider that a good adaptation is one that strictly respects its source material, even if it’s executed without any writing effort. A Minecraft Movie isn’t bad, it’s easy to watch without the slightest hint of difficulty, and at times it manages to raise a few smiles. But it’s still half a failure to manage to do so by being so careless and disrespectful in its writing, and by extension its audience.