A Minecraft Movie tries to construct a captivating tale, but falls off the rails

With A Minecraft Movie, Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre director Jared Hess and his writing team had the unenviable task of finding a consistent story in the world’s most popular video game. Minecraft is enjoyed by everyone from small children building their first basic cubic structures to grown adults who have mastered the game’s mechanics​. It’s become a sprawling, nearly universal experience that can be enjoyed as a dungeon crawler, an action-strategy game, a series of novels, or through endless YouTube challenges. So how do you translate that into a movie? The answer appears to be simple: antics.

The story begins in the small Idaho town of Chuglas, where Henry (Sebastian Hansen), a bright young orphan, has just moved with his older sister, Natalie (Emma Myers), following their mother’s death. There, they meet Dawn (Danielle Brooks), a real estate agent/mobile zoo proprietor, and Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), the proprietor of a failing game store, who has never been able to recapture the former glory of his ’80s run as an arcade-game champion. 

While looking for ways to save his store, Garrett finds a mysterious orb and crystal that, when combined, open up a portal to the Minecraft Overworld. When Henry attempts to impress his classmates with a cool custom-made jetpack and it goes horribly wrong, he kicks off a set of events that leads the cast through the portal and into the world of Minecraft. The unlikely group of adventurers quickly meets the orb and crystal’s previous owner, Steve (Jack Black), who represents the Minecraft everyman in the game’s marketing. 

Little does this makeshift crew know that the portal has opened due to the machinations of piglin leader Malgosha (Rachel House), a powerful mage who wishes to destroy the Overworld to drain it of resources. When Steve accidentally opens a second portal, leading from the Overworld to the piglins’ hellish underworld the Nether, it’s a big opportunity for Malgosha, who puts her devious plan against the “roundlings” into effect. Antics ensue.

Here is a brief, incomplete list of some of the silly scenarios our protagonists have to deal with on their quest to recover the orb and crystal so they can return home: An incredibly chill and oddly accommodating piglin captain voiced by Hess threatens to “unalive” Steve. The piglins host a talent show in the Nether. Jason Momoa has a wrestling match with a baby-zombie chicken jockey. Jack Black sings about how delicious lava-fried chicken is. It’s implied that Jennifer Coolidge, who plays a minor role as Chuglas’ assistant principal, has sex with a Minecraft villager. Garrett and Steve have to cuddle together, faces pressed betwixt each other’s knees, to get through a narrow crevice during a frantic air chase. Jack Black tells the gang, “First we mine, then we craft! Let’s mine-craft!” All these events are held together with a fast-paced plot that focuses more on moving the characters through ridiculous circumstances than on telling a coherent story. 

At first, the CG interpretations of Minecraft settings, animals, monsters, and villagers are overwhelming: A carnival of nightmare visuals marches across the screen. The villagers are alarmingly fleshy, their eyes too moist for comfort. A sheep’s chewing motions are exaggerated and uncanny. Eventually, though, the alarming effect fades. Some designs are perfectly pleasant to look at, like the piglins, creepers, and iron golems. Once the story is in motion and the characters are moving through elaborate in-game environments, there’s so much going on, and the Minecraft architecture is so familiar, I stopped being concerned and started having fun.

The decision to make Minecraft an isekai story (a popular anime subgenre where a mundane protagonist is transported to a fantastical world) is bewildering, since the game has completely saturated our zeitgeist. Everyone I know, from older friends to my little cousins, knows what Minecraft is, to the point where it’s confusing to watch a group of people entering the Overworld and reacting to it with such confusion and wonder. There are no glittering spires or alien architecture; it looks like a video game forest. It’s odd that no one, not even Natalie — who works in social media for a living! — recognizes what a video game’s graphics look like.

There are some cute nods to the game and how players express themselves that did make me smile, however: The protagonists struggle through their first night, when monsters like zombies, spider jockeys, and creepers spawn and there is no shelter, until Steve shows up and effortlessly smashes the monsters. At one point, the players accidentally stumble upon Steve’s old creeper spawner, full of creepers who are agitated at the intruders and quickly begin a lethal chain explosion. (Highly relatable. I too often set unexpected traps for my future self.) 

Characters escape a falling death by pouring out a water bucket and landing in the water, a useful in-game trick that real players regularly rely on. Steve teaches Natalie, Henry, and Garrett how to use a crafting table and set up recipes. At one point, Henry has to dig through a bunch of random chests filled with assorted loot that Steve gathered and stored in the past — also relatable. I’m always losing my valuables in one chest or another.

Jason Momoa as Garrett steals the show in A Minecraft Movie, in part because he’s so completely unafraid of embarrassment. In this movie, he’s beaten up, humiliated, set on fire, and exploded, among half a dozen other miserable fates suitable for a Looney Tunes character. Still, he keeps up a certain bravado, which makes him the most interesting member of the cast. The kids in my theater laughed and cheered every time Momoa made a joke, and he’s definitely the most memorable character by far.

A Minecraft Movie doesn’t explore the relationship between player and game in an earnest way, like The Lego Movie. It also doesn’t recap or adapt tales from the franchise, like the Sonic the Hedgehog movie franchise. Instead, Hess and the five-person writing team try to make it into a tribute to the general concept of Minecraft, and the general concept of creativity. Both Steve and Henry find the Overworld to be a respite from the real world, where Henry in particular finds that no one believes in or respects his desire to build things. But that message is so slight that it doesn’t really land.

The idea that Henry would be relentlessly bullied for being creative and liking to build things feels absurd in 2025, when every kid I know yearns for the mines. Instead, the movie skates by on shenanigans like the goofy scenarios above, or a silly action scene where Natalie fights off hordes of monsters with a hoe. This is clearly an experience that’s primarily meant for kids, rather than one where the writers have to sneak in clever jokes to occupy the adults who are paying attention. Minecraft is a game for absolutely everyone, and the movie gestures at including the same audience, with a few clumsy attempts at meaningful character relationships and personal arcs. But those subtle elements are so disconnected and often contradicted by later scenes that I stopped caring at all.

The silly, slapstick elements mean that A Minecraft Movie isn’t actively boring and remains baseline entertaining, but thinking deeply about any aspect of the movie at all causes it to crumble. This is an adaptation that keeps the surface trappings of the original material, but fails to capture any of the joy and adventure in Minecraft.

A Minecraft Movie opens in theaters on April 4.