‘A Minecraft Movie’ or — A Celebration of Rampant Stupidity?
In the early 2000’s Jared Hess was briefly an indie film darling. His feature debut, ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ (2004), had become a cult hit and its symmetrical framing and quirky humour led many indie film fans to believe they might have another Wes Anderson on their hands. Then Hess committed the ultimate indie film crime — he made ‘Nacho Libre’ (2006) and went full-blown stupid.
Now, much like fans of The Smiths, early 2000’s indie film fans are an insufferably pretentious bunch because their only concern isn’t if the movie they’re watching is any good or not but if publicly proclaiming to like it makes them look cool. This is why being mildly “quirky” is acceptable because it’s a stance that suggests a certain detached hipness. But full-blown stupidity? That’s intolerable because it’s a complete rejection of “cool” and an embrace of the infantile, and with ‘Nacho Libre’ (an underrated masterpiece, btw) Hess had dived head-first into the children’s swimming pool and was gleefully thrashing about in its pee-tasting waters. He would NOT, it seemed, be the new Wes Anderson after all (thank god).
So how would Hess’ puerile sensibilities combine with a multi-million dollar gaming franchise? From the reaction the audience had at the showing of ‘A Minecraft Movie’ (2025) I attended yesterday I would say spectacularly well because they were going fucking wild!
Now, it’s impossible to exaggerate to anyone over the age of thirty just how much of a big deal Minecraft is to a certain, younger generation and for this audience in their late teens/early twenties it was as though they were witnessing the cultural event of the century.
They burst into rapturous applause every time a beloved Minecraft object appeared on screen, and considering this was on an almost constant basis this was happening every fifteen seconds or even less. There were collective gasps of awe, standing ovations, en masse ecstatic clapping and shrieks of disbelief continuously erupting throughout the entire movie. It was as though I was in the audience for the unveiling of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ or hearing the opening chords of Beethoven’s 5th for the first time only these moments of vast cultural magnitude were occurring every four or five seconds and typically revolving around Jason Momoa flying Jack Black like a human jet-pack.
Although the film’s biggest reaction was for something called the ‘lava chicken’ which ignited a response from the crowd so frenzied and deranged that the only realistic comparison is to the opening performance of Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’.
But I couldn’t blame them because Hess takes ‘A Minecraft Movie’ and does with it what he does best, and that’s blast it along with a lunacy so unapologetic it transcends criticism. And that’s what’s most remarkable about ‘A Minecraft Movie’ because more than being a giant advert for a game, a cynical piece of marketing or a Hollywood blockbuster this is, explicitly a Jared Hess movie. Is it Minecraft? Yes, but it’s vastly more the product of the guy who once had a gonad-less Sam Rockwell destroy a flying battle-stag by puking into its face.
I can honestly say I’ve never attended a movie screening where the audience was uplifted to such dizzying heights of euphoric elation as with this, and that includes several Tarkovsky showings at the GFT. It’s a triumph of ego-less imbecility over empty preening posturing and the final confirmation I needed to breathe a sigh of relief that Hess rejected any and all suffocating indie pretension because ‘A Minecraft Movie’ is better than anything Wes Anderson’s made in the last ten years.