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.
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.
Minecraft MovieA 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.
