By Juliette Bolle-Leon
Movie theaters are an experience: when watching a piece of art worth millions of dollars, emotion should be palpable, shared with a neighbor. “A Minecraft Movie” was exactly that.
The impression Minecraft has left on the entirety of Gen Z, myself included, cannot be understated. Its music parodies have influenced my tastes in music and have even brought me to tears. YouTubers who recorded mod reviews and let’s-plays provided stability in times of crisis. The game itself has provided years of bonding with friends. It would not suffice to say that Minecraft is popular. It is adored and it is loved.
Minecraft has defined more than a decade of video game culture and nostalgia. A movie based on the highest-selling video game in history, with over 350 million copies sold, has high expectations to uphold.
Initially, trailers disappointed. Out-of-touch Hollywood humor and appalling CGI soiled what Minecraft was about – creativity. With more footage coming out and excitement from Jack Black, especially, I realized something. It was never meant to be good. It would not uphold expectations, nor did it ever intend to, especially with the bar so high. Instead, it would be terrible. Purposely terrible. It would defy expectations altogether and shatter the dream of Minecraft’s adaptation being anything except lucrative.
And I loved it.
I did more than love it, actually. I stood up and applauded. I screamed the lines from the trailers. I posed next to the movie poster. I made it a part of my personality, singing songs from the film to myself while getting ready in the morning. My love for the film has been the primary focus of several Instagram stories with zero shame in any of it.
Black’s constant referencing of items from Minecraft made standing ovations commonplace during the film. His flint and steel, his shared elytras, his full set, all exclaimed with palpable enthusiasm. His passion for the craft made him mine better than ever.
Setting aside Black’s vigor, the premise starts on an incredibly high note. Our main character, Henry, is a young boy who wants to stretch his creative bounds, yet is shunned in his small Idahoan town. So, to prove his bullies wrong, he makes a jetpack out of school supplies. The only problem? The bullies tamper with his creation, resulting in the destruction of Chuglass’s potato chip factory mascot, Chuggy the Chip. In less than 20 minutes, we are given a glimpse into the brilliance that this film encapsulates.
But it gets better. Way better, actually. Jason Momoa’s character, Garett “The Garbage Man” Garrison – yes, that is his name – keeps wanting to relive the glory days of being a 1989 arcade game champion. He buys a storage unit because it was advertised to have an Atari Cosmos, an unreleased product from Atari that can sell for thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, the unit only had the box that held the Cosmos system, but it holds a mysterious, glowing cube, the Orb of Dominance, which is shaped like a cube because it’s from Minecraft, where everything is a cube. Garrison decides to sell the orb at his shop to Henry after pretending to be his uncle to prevent him from being expelled. This isn’t even the Minecraft portion of the movie.
The Minecraft portion of “A Minecraft Movie” follows Steve, Jack Black’s character, who builds his kingdom in the Overworld alongside his wolf friend Dennis years prior to the real-life events. Steve finds a deactivated Nether portal, which he reconstructs out of curiosity. When he enters the Nether, however, he meets Malgosha, the leader of the piglins who hates creativity. She hates creativity because she was laughed at during a talent show called Nether’s Got Talent. Steve is held captive by Malgosha, but Dennis escapes to Earth via a portal Steve activated by combining the Orb of Dominance with the Earth Crystal. I’m sure you’re following, so I’ll carry on.
You may have paid for the full movie theater seat, but you are on the edge of it for the entire 101-minute duration of the movie. The slight homoeroticism between Steve and Garrison made the viewing tense yet engaging. Henry’s imagination and immediate knowledge of how Minecraft works make him a valuable asset as a Minecraft modder, making items that don’t even exist in the game. The other two characters, Henry’s sister Natalie and the siblings’ real estate agent Dawn, have little screen time, and all character development happens off-camera. By the way, they need a real estate agent because their mom died. Are you writing all of this down?
This review could not cover everything, even if I wanted it to. The intricacies of a film like this can’t simply be restated, no matter how many movie reviewers may believe otherwise. Those reviewers probably took the movie at face value and left disappointed in what they watched, though I couldn’t imagine why.
Sure, some people may watch terrible writing and shoddy green screen effects and think, “Wow, this cost more money to make than a public school’s annual budget!” And sure, that would technically be true. But I ask those people, could a public school create standing ovation after standing ovation every time Black references an item from a beloved video game? Could a public school, in one year, bear the excitement, the anticipation, of the average Minecraft enjoyer? Could a public school have done any of what the movie did with 11 years of production delays? “A Minecraft Movie” did it all, becoming the fourth highest-grossing movie of 2025, and the world may be better for it.
I couldn’t hate this movie if I tried. “A Minecraft Movie” was knowingly tacky, but the passion in its creation made the film something more than just the cash-grab it was originally meant to be. The hundreds of hours the cast put into a Minecraft server, the reference to Technoblade, the B-plot, I could go on. In essence, the film carried soul. It reminded me of a valuable lesson I keep needing to reteach myself: stop taking everything so seriously. You can love something bad because it’s stupid, and you can most certainly treat yourself with that same compassion. The moment you forget to find charm in things, the further childhood seems to slip away. Accept the bad things in life, but retain the silliness that makes the heavy so much lighter. Life tries to cook the common man with lava; everyone is forced to work just to make things that’ll eventually break. Mine, then craft, day in and day out. By finding the unserious, we sharpen our swords and ready ourselves for monsters of the night. Chicken jockey.
