The Only Way to Withstand 'A Minecraft Movie' Is to Embrace It

Over the weekend, I attended a screening of A Minecraft Movie with my son and six of his friends, all of whom are 17 or 18 years old. They’d grown up playing Minecraft, knew all the references, and mostly wanted to see it for ironic, nostalgic reasons. Nobody walked into this thing expecting it to be good.

I went because teenagers who grow up in cities have absolutely zero interest in learning how to drive, they needed a ride, and my kid knows I’m a sucker. I could not have dreaded it more. The movies I wanted to see — Warfare, The Amateur, and The Drop — didn’t have showtimes that lined up well, and besides, nothing delights a teenager quite like watching an old man suffer.

I had a blast.

I’m just not entirely sure how much of that was because of the movie itself. A Minecraft Movie is profoundly stupid. Like, dumber than splattered Kool-Aid puke. If I’d watched it alone, at home, on my couch, I almost certainly would’ve bailed 20 minutes in. But in a packed theater, surrounded by teenagers treating this thing like it was Rocky Horror for the brain rot generation? I had the time of my life.

In fact, screenings of A Minecraft Movie across the country have apparently become pure chaos. There are reports of people sneaking live chickens into theaters. Cops have been called. Popcorn is flying. Kids are yelling at the screen like they’re possessed by Capri Sun straws. Under normal circumstances, I would rather die than attend a screening like that. But for this movie? The chaos isn’t a problem. It’s the whole goddamn point.

At my screening, it felt less like watching a movie and more like being inside the “Everything’s Fine” meme. Lines like “I AM STEVE,” “FLINT AND STEEL,” and “CHICKEN JOCKEY” were shouted back at the screen with the kind of full-throated joy usually reserved for “Oh Brad!” or “DAMNIT JANET” at Rocky Horror midnight shows. It was absurd. It was stupid. It was contagious.

And to their credit, the cast seems fully in on the joke. I know Matt Berry was once rumored to play Steve, but I honestly can’t imagine anyone other than Jack Black pulling this off. He commits so hard he almost pulls a groin. And somehow, God help me, he and Jason Momoa have electric comedy chemistry. Not acting, exactly. More like feral energy plus whatever bizarre cosmic force happens when two human cartoons collide.

Momoa plays a washed-up video game champion who peaked in 1989, and who — along with a 13-year-old kid named Henry (Sebastian Hansen), his older sister (Emma Myers), and their apartment realtor, Dawn (Danielle Brooks) — somehow gets sucked into the Minecraft world. How does that happen? That’s the last thing in the world that matters in this movie.

The “plot” — and I use that word generously — revolves around recovering the missing half of a magic orb in order to save Minecraft from some dastardly, mustache-twirling pigs. But trying to explain the story here is like trying to explain why the prune-juice taste of Dr. Pepper is delicious: technically possible, but ultimately pointless. Logic doesn’t apply. Game mechanics barely apply. Even Minecraft superfans will leave baffled by the adaptation choices.

But none of it matters. What matters is Jack Black and Jason Momoa pulling off some kind of 69-sandwich mid-air maneuver to rocket through a canyon. What matters is Jack Black transforming into a singing, punching, Minecraft Jason Bourne to obliterate zombies and pigs. The whole thing is so aggressively ridiculous, so proud of its own nonsense, it makes American economic policy look coherent by comparison.

And yet … it works but only, only, if you embrace the chaos. Only if you accept that kids will be dancing in front of the screen during the end credits while the audience waits for a post-credits stinger that barely makes sense.

So-bad-they’re-good movies are a dying genre, but somehow, the $550 million A Minecraft Movie has raked in over its first 10 days suggests it may be the biggest and most successful example of the genre since Dude, Where’s My Car?. What does that mean for the state of the movie industry? Probably nothing good. But for now? I’m choosing to take it as a win. Until the studios inevitably try to intentionally make them and ruin them forever.