What’s up my know-it-alls? Yes, it’s another review with Baby Know and Boyfriend Know. I’m Baby Know, he’s sitting right here, and we both saw the Minecraft movie. Not together, though. He went with his friends and I went with my dad.
We both had a great time. He’ll tell you he went in not expecting much, because when you make a live action and animated movie out of a pixelated cube game, you’re not expecting anything serious. He grew up playing Minecraft. He and his boys are about to start a Minecraft realm just for fun. And the first preview he saw was Jack Black as Steve, which, with all due respect, is not who you picture as Steve. But then again, who could you possibly see as Steve?
For those who don’t know what Minecraft is, Steve is the main character, I guess.
When the movie was first announced, a year or two ago, all we got was a post that said a Minecraft movie. He thought we were getting a completely animated movie, something like the Super Mario movie with voice actors, and he figured Jack Black voicing Steve was going to be really funny. Then the preview showed Jack Black just being Steve, and it got a couple of good laughs out of him.
For me, I knew it was coming out, but I didn’t realize it was coming out, if that makes sense. He texted me that he was going to see it and I was like, wait, it’s out already? I played Minecraft when I was younger. I have an entire world, you can ask him, and it’s full of anything you can think of, because you can make anything in Minecraft. So I was excited.
A Movie That Just Wants to Be Fun
I did the Barbie review, you remember that, and I loved the Barbie movie, so no shade. But Minecraft did something I feel like Barbie didn’t. It was fun in its own way and it never shoved a message down your face. I went in there and was happy the entire time.
Boyfriend Know’s read is that from a critical point of view it’s probably an awful movie, and I said absolutely. The animation is really cool, though. His only issue is at the very beginning, when Steve first enters the Minecraft world, which is called the Overworld. You can easily tell it’s a guy standing in front of a green screen. After that, you couldn’t tell anything.
What made it good, he says, is that they played into the dumbness. They knew it was a dumb idea when they pitched it. “You can’t write Jack Black as Steve from Minecraft, not animated, with Garrison the Garbage Man played by Jason Momoa, in a fully animated world, and not just laugh at it.” Letting themselves be in on the joke is what let the movie be fun.
He watched Barbie too and thought it was a really good movie, but it played heavily into the feminist movement. Minecraft had no societal issue it wanted to talk about. The only thing it really says is be creative. It’s okay, you don’t have to run away to another world, just be creative. And that’s the point of the game anyway.
Two Theaters, Two Crowds
For months there’d been memes going around online, like the moment everybody finally meets him and he goes, “I am Steve.” His whole theater was playing into it. Any time Jack Black said one of those lines, the entire theater went nuts. His friend recorded a video during the chicken jockey scene.
There’s a rare occasion in Minecraft where a chicken generates into the world with a baby zombie on top of it. It’s really fast and it’ll really hurt you. In the movie, Jason Momoa’s character has to fight one in a WWE style ring, and when the zombie drops on the chicken, Steve just goes, “chicken jockey.” His whole theater got up, clapping and screaming.
I went to an earlier showing, so mine was full of kids, and honestly I found that more refreshing. Minecraft just hit its 15 year mark. There were kids in there maybe half our age, maybe a little older, and they’re still playing it. They weren’t playing into the meme. They were reacting to the movie. When the villager went through the portal into our world, the kids were yelling, “No, don’t do that!” Sometimes kids don’t know manners, but it’s a Minecraft movie, and grown adults were yelling chicken jockey. You know what I mean?
So there’s another generation that loves Minecraft. It isn’t something washed up from the past. Me and Mr. Know-It-All played Minecraft together at one point because it was a way we could bond.
Boyfriend Know and his sister built a whole world in creative, and he actively played survival. He’s beaten the Ender Dragon multiple times. Not to toot his own horn, but toot toot.
The Piglin Problem and the Villager Romance
His one big critique is the Piglin queen. We both forgot her name. Her subplot felt like it was supposed to be the whole point of the movie, and she had a lot of wasted potential. She could’ve been used a lot more than she was.
I’d told him I didn’t get why they didn’t just do the End. If you don’t play Minecraft, the End is a different portal where you fight the Ender Dragon, and if you beat the dragon you beat the game. Part of me thought that’s where they were going, but they went to the Nether. He pointed out that you do technically have to go to the Nether for blaze rods before you can get to the End. Still, I agree with him about the wasted potential. I did like the one guy who was supposed to be big and mean and was really salty about everything. He was funny.
Some people might think this is a hot take. I thought the whole villager storyline with Jennifer Coolidge was so funny and so cute. The subplot is Jennifer Coolidge falling in love with a villager. I can’t make that up. Villagers talk in villager, they just go “hmm,” and by the end of the movie he knows English and she knows villager and they’re going to get married. Some people said there was no reason to have that. You’re absolutely right. There was no reason to have it, but it was funny. There’s no reason to have the whole movie.
The best part of it is when the waitress comes up to them at dinner and asks, “Are you finished?” and the answer is, “No, I think he’s Swedish.”
I also loved the mushroom house. So cottage core.
Where the Game Fan in Him Got Stingy
Boyfriend Know grew up on this game, so he’s very stingy about accuracy. He’s talked to me about this several times.
Steve’s pink house is made of pink wool, and he started in on how many pink sheep that takes, which are one of the rarest things in the game. He thinks it’s something like a 5% chance. I said Steve never told us he killed a bunch of pink sheep. He could’ve dyed the wool. He took that one back.
When everybody’s getting chased in the Overworld, the things chasing them are skeletons riding on top of spiders. That’s very, very rare in the game, and at the start of the movie it’s all you see. There isn’t one plain skeleton or one plain spider. “So you’re telling me whatever Overworld they happened to find was this one out of a trillion lucky chance of an Overworld.”
Then there’s the creeper. The kid builds the tower, they all hide in it, Jason Momoa runs in, they build blocks behind him, and the creeper blows up anyway. In the game a creeper only blows up if it sees you, and behind a block of dirt it can’t see you. He says that explosion isn’t physically possible. He admits it’s a stupid little critique.
The elytras bug him too, the wings they fly with. You only find those in the End, so Steve would’ve already had to beat the Ender Dragon. I thought Steve said he had. Boyfriend Know says that line was about killing an Enderman for an ender pearl.
My own critique is the flying iron golem. Unless it’s been too long since I played, that’s not a thing. He says not unless they have mods.
He did really like the fight at the end. You can build iron golems in the game: four iron blocks, one on the bottom, one on top of it, two on the sides of the top one, and a pumpkin on top like a jack-o’-lantern. They protect villagers, and they’re peacekeepers until you attack them. So the characters build an army of them, and the Piglin army laughs, because the golems won’t fight unless provoked. And since it’s a kids’ comedy, one little piglin shoots one tiny arrow and sets off the whole thing. He liked that they played by the rule.
Characters, Dennis, and the End Credits
We both love Jason Momoa’s character. He was so good.
Boyfriend Know didn’t really like the main kid. He felt flat: the typical nerdy kid who gets bullied at school and ends up the coolest kid, the same thing every one of these movies does, and that dynamic gets old. The sister felt flat to him too. When she first came on screen I thought she was about 16. They were pushing her to be around 20, I’m pretty sure, and she doesn’t look it.
The zookeeper, we liked. We forgot her name, but she was in Peacemaker, and it was nice to see her do a film.
Dennis, the dog. Oh my gosh. They dragged that out. The dog leaves with the cube and comes back as a wolf, and that part confused both of us.
I liked the end credits scene a little more than he did. People kept saying you’ve got to stay for it, and all it does is show you the back of Alex, who’s another playable character in Minecraft. He says that’s not much, though it does mean she could be in a part two. I liked it because, obviously, I’m a girl, and I wanted to play as a girl and not Steve. I loved how they did it, with “you used to own this house.” Super cute.
The elytra scene with Jason Momoa and Jack Black was really, really funny, and the stabbing scene was pretty funny too. He compares it to Shrek, a movie for kids where adults find their own humor. There are a couple of adult jokes, and in the elytra scene the two of them end up switching into some not very family friendly positions. The kids found it funny and so did he. It just surprised him.
Lava Chicken and Dave Grohl
I can’t believe we almost didn’t talk about the lava chicken. We were in the car coming home from church, I believe, and he was playing the lava chicken song and just would not stop.
I wasn’t expecting musical numbers, but they were funny, and they were actually pretty good. His fun fact is that Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters and Nirvana played drums on a couple of the songs. He doesn’t know about the whole band, but he knows Dave Grohl did drums.
That, to him, is the movie in one sentence. “You cannot tell me you write this on paper: Jack Black and Jason Momoa in a 3D animated world where they fight some piglin witch, with musical numbers Dave Grohl drums on. ChatGPT couldn’t do that, guys. This sounds like a fanfic some 13-year-old made who’s into Foo Fighters and Minecraft. There’s no way a sensible human being came up with this movie. And that’s what I love about it. It’s so unserious that you have to take it serious.”
Go In Expecting a Kids’ Comedy
If you haven’t seen it, I think you should. In its first weekend it already outdid Five Nights at Freddy’s and the Super Mario movie. If you’re looking for a fun movie to watch, I’d recommend it, and if I could I’d watch it again.
Boyfriend Know loves movies like Good Will Hunting. We just watched Beautiful Boy. Those are some of his favorites, besides Cars, which is his favorite movie of all time. You don’t go into Minecraft like that. You go in expecting a kids’ comedy and expecting to have fun, and you’ll enjoy it. Go with your friends.
One thing if you’re a group of teenagers. He’s seen plenty of videos of teenagers absolutely wrecking theaters at this movie, throwing popcorn everywhere, even one of a guy tackling an employee. Don’t do it like that. Getting loud when something funny happens, like the chicken jockey scene, is technically not movie theater etiquette, but he thinks it’s funny and it makes the movie more fun.
He knows people who’ve already seen it four times and still enjoy it every time. It’s not critically acclaimed and it’s not going to be in the top 100 movies of all time. It’s still a fun movie to watch. He says too many movies lately are trying to fit some societal issue and nobody’s just making fun movies. And then he said he’s seen a lot of movies recently, by companies who will not be named, Marvel, that just aren’t good anymore and are kind of boring to watch.
At which point my dad cut into the video with this: “Trigger warning. The views and opinions expressed by Boyfriend Know-It-All are not those of Mr. Know-It-All or the Know-It-All Nation as a community. Disgruntled subscribers should take heart. Mr. Know-It-All is in fact reconsidering allowing this boy to date Baby Know-It-All now or in the future.”
His point was that those movies try jokes that don’t land, and then you have a stupid joke like chicken jockey that gets an entire theater up and laughing. He’s not a movie critic. He knows Mr. Know-It-All does the deep analysis. He goes to movies expecting an enjoyable experience, and that’s what he got.
He thought the critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes was a 28. We looked it up. It’s a 48. The audience score is an 88. So his advice is never trust the critics there and always trust the audience score, because the critics don’t go in expecting what the movie is going to be. If you just want to have a good time, go see it. He’s talked to people who had no interest in it until they heard him talk about it, and now they’re going. Sure, the hype will probably die off in a couple of weeks. Go see it anyway.
Why This One Worked
For me personally, and I joke, but it healed a piece of my inner child. It’s so nice seeing something I appreciated so much as a kid up on screen.
I could ask Mr. Know-It-All about this, but I wanted to know: D&D isn’t a video game, but the D&D movie tanked. Why did this silly movie do well and a serious one didn’t?
Boyfriend Know’s answer is the audience. Minecraft reaches from young kids just starting the game, to adults who played when it first came out, to parents who play with their kids. He figures most D&D players are young teenagers or young adults. And D&D isn’t really a plot or a story, because you make the story as you go. You can do whatever you want in Minecraft too, but there’s a set of laws to it, almost laws of creation.
For him the movie also paid homage to people he grew up watching. DanTDM was one of the auctioneers in one scene, and there were a couple of other YouTubers.
And I liked what they did with the pig with the crown. I always forget his name and I feel so bad. Technoblade. He was a YouTuber, part of a big group called the Dream SMP around COVID, and he died of cancer. Boyfriend Know says it wouldn’t have been in the movie at all except the main kid mentioned it to the director, the director got it put in, and he saw the post about it. In the scene, somebody sees the crown on the pig and asks if that’s the king, and Steve says no, “but he’s a legend.” There’s also a little scene built on an old meme from a long time ago that still goes around.
It played into his childhood and still left the floor open for new childhoods.
Two more things we liked. One of the creators of the game was the waiter in the dinner scene, which took him a little bit to catch. And the very beginning of the movie is made to look like you’re generating a Minecraft world, the way it looks when you load into the game. I’ll give it to them. That was creative.
Also, we got a gold cube. It was one of the collectibles, and there’s a Minecraft symbol on it. Sorry, I really like it.
The Verdict
A Minecraft Movie gets two numbers from each of us, and we’re not merging them: as a film, a 5 out of 10 from me and a four or five from Boyfriend Know, and as people who loved it, an 8.5 from me and almost a nine from him.
We were technically told not to do a rating. We wanted to do one because that’s just kind of how we do things. The reason for two is that Minecraft isn’t a serious movie, so rating it as a film and rating how much we actually liked it are different jobs.
We’re not critics, but as a critic I’d give it maybe a five. As someone who loved the movie, 8.5, because it was fun and there was no reason not to like it.
He’s in the same boat. As somebody who does like movies like Good Will Hunting, it’s not that good of a movie critically, so roughly what I said, a four or five. From a funny, I love this movie standpoint, he’s got to give it almost a nine. It showed him a lot of his childhood coming back.
Shout out to our Sunday school teacher, who really wanted us to do this. He’s not the reason we did this review, but we’re shouting him out anyway. Our favorite 30-year-old. I hope he appreciates that.
Watch the Minecraft movie.
Your turn. Was your theater the chicken jockey crowd or the kids yelling at the villager, and which game detail did the movie get wrong that you can’t let go? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
