Let’s get deep on Minecraft. Before I lost my sight, I was a heavy Minecraft player, albeit only on the XBOX. it was by far my most played game, since XBOX loves to track your progress across all the games you played, i know I had over fifty days played. Days. that doesn’t mean fifty days of my life I turned on the console and played XBOX, it means the amount of time I was logged in specifically playing Minecraft exceeded fifty days. That’s at least 1,200 hours of Minecraft. I left with a fairly impressive map, that many of my friends had contributed toward building what looked like a designed map. We had little towns with our own homes, a subway system to take us to other parts of the map, a rollercoaster, developed homes in the nether, end, and underwater. It is hard to do a lot of that while keeping things in survival mode. Needless to say, I was excited by the thought of a Minecraft film, but also totally lost as to what it could be. It is an open world game with basically no plot, except finding The End., and defeating the dragon. Everything else is staying alive and crafting. If someone had asked me, this felt like something Phil Lord and Chris Miller should have been given access to, as an animated feature. Instead, the film went through rewrites and re-castings and somehow is the top grossing film of 2025 so far. My mind is blown like a creeper actually sneaking up on me.

Nothing really works. there are five credited screenwriters for this, and it feels like a film that had five different passes. Danielle Brooks is here for reasons unknown, since her character barely exists, and is only tangentially connected to characters who are already poorly developed. The fact that they couldn’t do something great with Brooks after The Color Purple, or her kick ass Peacemaker role, is beyond me. Equally poorly written is Emma Meyers, who is the older sister now responsible for raising her younger brother, Henry (Sebastian Hanson) after their parents apparently died in one of those things the film doesn’t have time to talk about. Henry makes sense as a character, but his development is nonsensical and rushed. A better script would have done him justice. then we have Jason Momoa playing The Garbage Man, a failed video game icon who is trying to teach people how not to be a loser, while also losing at life. I will hand it to Momoa, who feels miscast, he really is trying. He’s wanting to make inroads into comedy like John cena, Dwayne Johnson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other action stars, and he is down for whatever in a role that has nothing really to do with his physical strength. these four end up getting pulled into Minecraft on a paper thin plot that we’ve gotten through a massive amount of exposition from Steve (Jack Black) at the beginning. Steve is technically the lead, and the exposition he describes actually feels like the failed early draft for this film, and somehow more interesting.

this script is terrible. But, despite being put in awful and poorly written scenes, the cast really does try to make everything work. The film is for fans, but isn’t so closed off that non-fans would be lost or not have fun. it feels like a silly video game, one that should have flopped like the original Super Mario Brothers, yet became a social media status symbol. From creating a house out of pink wool, to the silly way you tame a dog, and the way the villagers speak, there were so many fun pokes not just at the game or its mechanics, but jabs at it from an external fan standpoint. Even the audio description track sometimes takes the non-fan side when describing (like the somewhat silly description of a creeper), and other times uses Minecraft terminology (like red stone, which isn’t exactly a red stone). As someone who advocates that The last Of Us should be deviating more from the game, I’m not going to hold Minecraft to some insane standard of matching game play that is defined by players anyway. you create, that’s the game.

But, the story and plot is really bad, and feels like a room of people wrote it through post it notes and consulting AI. Jennifer Coolidge is here, almost offensively because of her talent,just so we can have a running gag about her and a villager in the real world. the villain here lacks any real point or development, and is mostly just covered by exposition. This film crams so much in, but never stopped to ask itself why something similar, like the Jumanji remake, worked. It wants to be that film so bad, but it just fails.

Jared Hess is doing the lords work by attempting to assemble this. I feel a sequel is coming, and I’m afraid. there were things they didn’t use or cover, so material is there. but, it needs a lot of help, and a total reconceptualization. Honestly, I’d make a movie about what Steve did in the exposition, as that was promising at the start. then, they made the mistake of adding more cast. But, everyone is so underdeveloped it would be easy to gaslight someone into believing they missed a scene when they were watching the whole time.

it feels like if we’re going to include Danielle Brooks, we should know more about her than being a real estate agent or having an alpaca. it feels like we should know something about why the kids don’t have parents, or the company Meyers goes to work for before they become irrelevant. It feels like Henry should have more character development than running into The Garbage Man, and then trying to build a Jetpack. these characters have truncated chunks of story, chopped for time, that ends up being detrimental as they aren’t even archetypes. We aren’t even following the nerd, the pretty but dumb one, the jock, and the outcast. these people have very little background, and yet are a huge part of Steve’s story.

I could tell from watching that this film had been through rewrites and screenwriters, and I actually would have guessed more. Maybe eight? It is a hodgepodge that believes it retained the best ideas from a room of people, but lacked a final shepherd to bring all those concepts and ideas together to make an actual film. much like the game itself where you can build or do whatever you want, and the game is based on a system of ideas, the film itself is also ideas. Unlike a video game, a movie is not an open world user controlled environment where all of our experiences are unique, and we create our own adventure. Maybe someday virtual films will feel like that, where we can make it up as we go along. That isn’t what film is now though.

there are some clever Minecraft references, a cast that is game for whatever, and a strong audio description track to keep this from being a truly terrible film. It just can’t be what it wants to be, which is what Minecraft the game is. Everything for anybody.

Rotten: Final Grade: 4.7/10 ,Audio Description: A-