Movie Review: A Minecraft Movie (2025)

A Minecraft Movie (2025) directed by Jared Hess

Steve (Jack Black) is a hapless drone selling doorknobs who has always dreamed of working as a miner. Rejected from the local mine as a child, he returns one day after realizing he does not like his job. He sneaks around the old miner, goes inside, and discovers two artifacts. When he combines them, he opens a portal into the Overworld. Everything is cube-like and also magical (it's the world of Minecraft as we know it, except rendered in detailed CGI rather than 8-bit graphics). He is able to build things and befriends a wolf that becomes his pet dog Dennis. The Overworld is threatened by Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House) from the Nether (a sort of underworld). Steve and Dennis are kidnapped by her so she can get the portal items. Steve sends them off with Dennis back to the real world to hide it in his home. This all happens before the opening titles.

The story then shifts to Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and Natalie (Emma Myers), a brother and sister moving to Steve's hometown in Idaho after their mother died (no mention or sign of their father). Natalie takes a job at the local potato chip factory as a social media developer while Henry goes to school, where he is bullied for his creativity and genius. He runs into Garrett (Jason Momoa), a has-been video game ace who runs a run-down video game store in town. Garrett tries to buy the storage unit that has Steve's stuff and winds up with the teleporting items. Henry spots the items in the store and intuits that they go together. Once combined, they are drawn to the mine with the portal. Natalie is worried since Henry hasn't come home from school and calls up the real estate lady ((Danielle Brooks). They team up and find Henry and Garrett at the mine. They all get sucked into the Overworld, where Henry's creativity thrives while safety is threatened once again by the return of the teleporting materials.

After all that set-up, the movie goes in full Minecraft mode, having some crafting and some village visits and battles with monsters and a quest or two. Many creatures from the game are lovingly recreated, as are scenic areas, locations, and other actions. 

The plot is a very standard quest/adventure with predictable story-arcs for the characters. I was never surprised by any twists and saw things coming far ahead of time. Black and Momoa's performances are both very over-the-top, too much so even for this movie. Black's accent drifts around too, probably for comic effect but it was not very funny. I think I only laughed four or five times, so the film didn't pass the six-laugh test from Mark Kermode. I've played a bit of Minecraft, but only a bit, so I was familiar with most of the elements. My kids say it was mostly accurate but we agreed Creepers did not blow up like they do in the game. And the filmmakers add an annoying subplot where a Minecraft villager escapes from the Overworld into the real world and winds up dating the vice principal (Jennifer Coolidge) from Henry's school. It was cringe-inducing and was probably meant as comedy for adults, but I was cringing as much as my kids were.

Overall, I did not enjoy this movie. It had some funny moments but they were few and far between. A lot of plot holes and uneven pacing felt very unsatisfying. I think this is really for die-hard fans of the game, of which there are plenty.

Not recommended by me. But my kids gave it 7 and 8 out of 10. If you have Minecraft-playing children who have watched some of the YouTube videos and know those players, they will probably like it. So be a dutiful parent and take them to the movie.

Cute Kid Pix October 2020

 Here's some more stuff that didn't make it into its own post...

The kids participated in Minecraft Live, the online version of the official Minecraft convention. The makers introduced some of the new stuff coming in the next year. Viewers got to vote on a new mob for the game. Our initial vote was for the Moobloom (a cow/flower hybrid), but the glowing squid won. We still enjoyed our time, even if our candidate didn't win.

Enjoying the convention from home

My youngest is in a Cub Scout pack and had to go on a hike to find something hard, something soft, something smooth, something rough, and something colorful. We went to the woods behind our house and made some fun discoveries together.

That's the neighbor's fence!

Our oldest became a teenager and requested Cheesecake Factory for his special birthday dinner. He got a mac and cheese burger, which he liked very much. Unfortunately, we were too full for dessert!

A happy customer

We voted by mail-in ballot but did not mail in our ballots. After visiting one drop-off box that was locked, I drove to the Board of Electors parking lot where they had a drive-thru drop-off box.

Voting in the time of Covid

My son's Tiger den had one last outdoor meeting. We went for a short hike near Savage Park. We did discover some strange vegetation.

Social distance lineup

What the what?

Cute Kid Pix August 2020

 Here's some more photos that didn't make their own blog post...

We had a particularly picturesque set of fruit and vegetables from the Gorman Farm CSA.

Food as pretty as a picture!

My youngest had his birthday in August. We had a lowkey celebration with a Minecraft theme. We had Minecraft trivia and a cake like from Minecraft.

Putting on the finishing touches

The actual cake

The in-game cake

The happy birthday boy

Blowing out candles

One present he played with AND we took a photo of was Rhino Hero Super Battle, a card-stacking and dice-battling game that was a lot of fun.

Having fun at home!

We found a neighborhood playground that was fun and shady, in the good "blocking out the sun" way.

The view from the road

Climbing rings

She was hanging from the rings half a second before

Another fun climber

At another playground, my eldest continued his daring climbing adventures.

Climbing on the top

Minecraft Camp 2020

This summer, we've done a few "at home" summer camps where I did most of the camp counselor work. One day, I jokingly suggested that we should have a Minecraft camp where I was the camper and the kids were the camp counselors. They took me seriously and set about designing a camp with all the usual activities--snacks, crafts, videos, games, etc. They even made a sign for the garage door when I came back from an errand.

The door sign

As usual, the snacks were the most exciting and most photogenic part of the camp. The first day we made shortbread cookies since they use (mostly) ingredients found in Minecraft--sugar, flour, butter. We might have lost a few hearts taking the hot cookies off the cookie sheet but it was worth it.

Fresh from the oven

Finished product

Another popular food item in Minecraft is bread. We had one of the bread mix jars from an earlier Vacation Bible School. It was easy to bake as some small and delicious loaves.

Raw dough

We let these cool a bit before removing them

The crafting part of the camp involved creating and stocking a "hidey hole" in the basement. In Minecraft, it's important to have a shelter, especially at night when hostile mobs (that's mobile creatures, not large groups of pitchfork-wielding villagers) spawn and attack. We used the natural features of the landscape to make a small cave.

Putting a roof over our cave

One day we made a door for the entrance. Here's a view into the hidey hole from the door.

A comfy spot

We made a crafting table which enables players to make more complicated items. Items like a chest to store valuables or excess stuff without leaving clutter all over the hidey hole.

Crafting table and chest

We even made a bed, another important item in Minecraft. When your character dies, it respawns at its start location unless the character has slept in a bed. Then the bed is the respawn point. If you get killed in the middle of the night in the middle of who knows where, it's much better to respawn into a hidey hole than into a different outdoors area which probably has hostile mobs running around too.

The bed was not to scale for us but a stuffed animal lucked out.

A bed

We made pictures to brighten up the inside of the temporary home, though they both have hostile mobs, so how cheery can they be?

Creeper,  marker on paper (2020) by my daughter

Fighting a Creeper, colored pencil on paper (2020) by me

The hole was big enough for the kids to hang out in it, which they did.

A good spot to relax

Admiring the art

The camp was fun for children and adults alike. They managed to get me addicted to the game, which is a big win for them.

Advice for Surviving the Corona Virus

Here's some of the stuff I've been doing to survive the maddening effects of being trapped at home during the Corona virus lockdown.

A group of guys get together online to play the deck-builder card game Dominion online. We'd have a Zoom meeting on one screen and the game on another. After an initial discussion and some prayer time, we played the game and chatted. The large variety of cards means the game has a different set-up every time. It doesn't require too much focus either, though sometimes at the end we get more focused (i.e., more quiet). The mental health benefit of a weekly social night is very big during a lockdown.

A friend tipped me off to the beer-home-delivery service at biermi.com. The web site serves local breweries across the United States, providing the brewers a way to sell their product. Most breweries offer pick up service and/or delivery to their local area. We put an order in at Black Flag Brewing Company in the next town over. We've been meaning to visit the brewery but you never visit tourist sites in your own home town, do you? I ordered in the morning and they delivered in the afternoon.

Brew haul

The web page had "crowlers" on offer, so I thought I'd try them. Growlers are large, resealable glass bottles that are filled off of taps in bars and breweries. Crowlers are 32-ounce cans that serve the same purpose. They are only one-use but they are also recyclable.

A crowler

In healthier consumer news, a local food packing plant started selling boxes of vegetables or fruit or dairy products. The sales happen in the parking lot with a simple drive-thru system. The refrigerated trucks they use for delivery work just as well in their parking lot.

The set-up

Approaching the loading area

My load

For Cinco de Mayo, they had a special box with peppers, red onions, salsa, tortillas, and other thematic items. That inspired me to go and get that box and another one full of fruit.

Cinco de Mayo box

Box of fruit

Fruit salad!

Our local library has lots of digital resources--ebooks, audio ebooks, streaming music lessons, and even movies and TV shows. My daughter has been listening to the audio-book versions of the sequels to Alcatraz and the Evil Librarians since we can't get the physical books from the library. I'm taking ukelele lessons and borrowing graphic novels in digital format. We've worked our way through a lot of the items we borrowed before they closed, hopefully they will open again soon. Having another option to borrow items is great.

The spring baseball season has been cancelled, so we've played a lot of tee-ball and catch in the backyard. Filling in the sports gap has been hard. We've gone for lots of walks and bike rides in the neighborhood.

Weirdly enough, we've spent more time with the cousins on the west coast. They've gotten the Minecraft bug and we have a dedicated server so that the kids can all play together in the same world without other people.

Daughter with cousin on screen and on the phone in the lower right

Yes, a five-year old can do Minecraft!

Another pair of cousins

Hopefully the lockdown won't last long enough for another post like this, but only time will tell.

Cute Kid Pix April 2020

Here are some pictures that didn't make their own blog post...

Our kids have been practicing social distancing with their cousins (who are in California, so more than six feet away) and some more local friends by hanging out together in Minecraft. They are a lot more proficient than before we got locked in and the only way to "go outside" was to "go virtual." We bought an account to have our own private server.

My daughter online with a cousin

Showing off her castle

Checking his inventory

School started up again with distance/on-line learning. So I've gone back to Kindergarten. Here we are doing the Physical Education lesson which included a GoPro run through the paths near the teacher's house. We even had to jump some logs.

Running "outdoors"

Jumping a log

For art class, my littlest one had to make a color wheel from objects at home.

A home-made color wheel

Most of the school work is finished in the morning, leaving the afternoons free for other activities. The kids made banana muffins, dividing up the tasks among them. The youngest put the muffin papers in the pans. The older kids did two jobs: mixing the dry ingredients and mixing the wet ingredients. They took turns stirring the two mixtures into each other. Then they each filled one pan (our recipe makes twenty-four muffins!) and I put them (the pans, not the kids) in the oven.

Mixing ingredients before mixing mixtures

They turned out really well. We had enough left over so we could have "coffee and donuts" after our online church on Sunday. Nothing like tea and muffins after Mass!