A Minecraft Movie

The kids love it, and they're not wrong.

Let me get this out of the way, because it’s my biggest pet peeve in the realm of film criticism: I hate few things as much as I hate a review that doesn’t engage with the film on its own terms.

In the context of today’s post: if you’re reviewing a movie for kids, then at least try to understand its appeal to (and impact on) kids. Don’t write about it as if the film’s true goal should be to please you, the adult critic.

There are bad movies for kids out there, and it’s fair to critique them as such. But there are also movies that are specifically intended to appeal to a child’s sense of humour and critiquing them as though what children find funny is stupid because you find it unfunny is … well, it’s stupid.

Anyway, that’s my mini-rant, because the wildly successful, box-office-record-breaking-hit, A Minecraft Movie, is at 48% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the bad reviews seem to mostly be by people who freely admit to having no knowledge or experience of the game and no ability to penetrate its appeal or understand its target demographic. I haven’t done an exhaustive audit of the film’s reviews but I was curious enough to read a few, as I always am when the critical response to a film is at odds with its box office success.

David Sims at The Atlantic laments that what he liked about Minecraft when he tried playing it in 2011 was “the solitude,” and a tranquility that the film is lacking. Fair enough. I empathize. I too like the tranquility and solitude of building little houses in the forests and plains of Minecraft. But Sims was 20-something when he first tried playing the game, and I was in my 40s. In my world, the game is most popular with the seven-to-twelve-year-old set, a deeply freewheeling and imaginative cohort that loves chaos and rarely does “tranquility.”

Incidentally, one of the first things my kid did in Minecraft was not to build a house or figure out how to survive the night. He switched into “creative mode,” built a giant pit, filled it with juke boxes playing a discordant mix of different songs simultaneously, and then spawned about a hundred chickens in the pit and watched them jump around in a manic frenzy. That chicken rave was a thing of beauty.

Meanwhile, over at The New Yorker, a joyless review from Richard Brody in which he admits he’s never played the game, but did try, “in vain, to imagine the kind of childhood I didn’t have, in which I might have found such a movie entertaining.” It’s hard to believe his imagination isn’t up to the task, even as he notes that his own local theatre was full of kids shouting “chicken jockey” at the screen. Should it require that much imaginative prowess to look around and see the very children who are in that moment being entertained by a movie about a beloved game they grew up with?

In contrast, most of the film’s positive reviews include little disclaimers like “much of the action and humour here is aimed at the younger audience members,” “best enjoyed by the 12-and-under set,” and “clearly crafted to solely appeal to kids and superfans.” Indeed, indeed.

I have yet to find the negative reviews that come at it from a more engaged perspective. Actual gamers, or disappointed fans of the game who wanted something different from the cinematic adaptation? Adults who are capable of seeing it through the eyes of younger viewers, perhaps? I don’t know. I’m not saying you have to be a child to review a movie for children. But you do have to have enough imagination to “imagine the kind of childhood” that might lead one to enjoy it.

I once had a days-long argument on Twitter with a guy whose TIFF review of Hal Hartley’s Ned Rifle amounted to “this movie is bad because I don’t understand why the acting is so deadpan and stilted.” Look, you don’t have to love it. You can say “I don’t like Hartley’s style,” or “it’s 2014 and this guy’s shtick is played out” or any number of other things. But if you’ve never heard of the filmmaker, and you’re not willing to do the bare minimum to figure out what you’re watching, then maybe someone else should be writing that review.

Back to Minecraft.

I went to A Minecraft Movie with my kid earlier this week, his second viewing and my first. We were with a group of his pals, in a theatre full of kids. The film is joyous, messy, chaotic, and very good natured. The vibe is positive, and the cast is stacked with fantastic comedic actors. Even the moral of the story is on point: it’s okay (good, even) to be a creative weirdo. The kids in our theatre cackled with glee, sang along, shouted at the screen and ran around after the credits, interacting with each other via the film’s funniest catch phrases — all exactly as I was told might happen.

I’ve spoken to several other parents about the film since. The most common response seems to be some version of “I liked it more than I expected to.” Universally, parents in my circles laughed a lot, and appreciated the core message: that nurturing our creativity can breed acceptance, growth, friendship, and even courage.

Of course we, the adult viewers who don’t have the choice to opt out of a lot of children’s entertainment, have different standards than the average viewer or critic. We fear that kid-centric movies are going to be lazy or poorly written, frenetic-yet-boring (a depressingly common combo), trying too hard to be cool / shoehorning in adult jokes that border on inappropriate, or adhering too closely to a Disney-esque formula that makes every story beat extremely predictable. Anything halfway decent gets a beleaguered thumbs up from us, so I accept that we’re also not the most reliable critics here.

But, A Minecraft Movie is none of those things. It’s fun.

Well, okay, it’s a bit of the last thing - the monster-fighting section of the film was absolutely predictable, but infused with enough zany laughs to keep it entertaining.

It’s also chaotic, ridiculous, and full of great Easter eggs and in-jokes for fans of the game, a prime example of how prioritizing the core audience can yield great results. Someone who has zero familiarity with the game would be more confused than amused, but several of the film’s nods to fans were, even to someone as minimally engaged with the world of Minecraft as I am, pretty damn hilarious. The scene that plays during the film’s end credits (featuring Jennifer Coolidge and a “Villager”) nearly made me gag on my popcorn. No spoilers, but it’s perfect.

I’ve been circling something for a while, and here it is: while I accept that taste is subjective (as are opinions about movies), this movie is objectively not “bad,” because its intended audience, the under-12 set, adores it. And what measure of the goodness or badness of an entertainment product matters more than the honest response of those for whose pleasure it exists?

I know, I know, I’m being a teensy bit hyperbolic. People are, after all, perfectly capable of loving poorly made products and terrible ideas, en masse. But I’m over adult killjoys who have no respect for children shitting on things kids love. It’s giving “romance is a stupid genre [because women like it].”

My main criticism is that A Minecraft Movie could have easily handled several more musical numbers. Lava Chicken is a banger, and both Jack Black and Jason Momoa were clearly itching to burst into song throughout. They should have been given more chances.