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ZERO STARS/**** starring Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers screenplay by Chris Bowman & Hubbel Palmer and Neil Widener & Gavin James and Chris Galletta directed by Jared Hess
by Walter Chaw It’s tempting to get knives out to hack at the hanks of the great beast. It’s tempting to sharpen your tongue to shriek at it, how close we are now to Idiocracy‘s prophecy of Ass: The Movie being the most watched and awarded film in the land. I keep coming back to the image of Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, peering through the fourth wall to tell you it’s too late. They’re here already. The great beast will not feel you, and it does not have ears to hear you. It can’t feel shame. As it was never alive, you can’t kill it, and if you can’t kill it, neither can you bury it. You can fight, but you’ll lose. Not to the great beast, but to your friends and neighbours, who will urge you to forget it, take it easy. They will rationalize that some garbage piece of media was made for children, as if the things we make for children should be terrible. Feed them the rotten stuff, the maggot-infested stuff–they won’t know. Give them the chair with the splinters; the toy that takes eyes; the water full of lead. Why worry? It’s just for kids. It’s just for kids you don’t think will grow up or don’t care if they do. It’s cheaper not to let them live. When they consume, that’s less for you to consume. Maybe we should change our laws so they can work longer when they’re younger, because they don’t seem to last as long as they used to. Lie back and enjoy it. Pray you never get that direction outside of invitations to kid’s movies. Your friends and neighbours are pods now. I know they look like people, but they’re not. Your loved ones are dead. I’m sorry.
I believe our willingness to allow our children to wither in body and mind is the rough beast Yeats warns us about in “The Second Coming”. All those “best” who sit on their hands, who have been taught throughout their school years not to think seriously about the products of our culture. The stories we share, we who are designed to rely upon stories for our survival as a species, are beneath study. Cultural literacy? A waste of time. I know, you’re worried I’m not well because I’m using this movie of all movies to talk about these things. As a nation, we refuse to release No Other Land because we’ve saved 3,000 screens for A Minecraft Movie–a decision we’ll reward with the year’s first billion-dollar return and an increasingly blind eye to our nation’s wholesale genocide of the people who used to live on our huckster dictator’s future failed strip of casinos. I wonder if you’ve ever considered who it benefits most not to look closely at the stories we tell ourselves about our culture. Who is against you waking up? More than opposed, actually offended by the notion of your coherence, your education, your ability to solve a difficult puzzle. Is that why so many of our kids are gunned down in their classrooms? Is that why the Catholic Church and Republican politicians haven’t been banned yet in the name of the thousands upon thousands of our children destroyed by them, buried beneath their schools and in their ledgers?
Why do we tolerate it? Because if you can’t fight it, you normalize it. That way, you don’t kill yourself from the shame of not fixing it. People much smarter than me have been writing about this for centuries. Artists, real artists, the kind that bleed themselves into their work compulsively, with disastrous consequences to their health and legacy, have only ever had this as their message. We are divided between lions and Cassandras. One side will win. The other side was right. So, like always, a thing called A Minecraft Movie is going to be wildly successful and spawn another round of movies people will moan about not understanding why they were made, and this will continue until the next endlessly replicable premise is discovered and hung upside-down, bled fish-belly white, and left befouled and humiliated as a liquifying carcass–one that is, after all, good enough for the kids. It’s just for kids! Say it like a mantra. Say it like a prayer as you tuck your children in tonight. “Hey kid, this is awful. It’s bereft of any value. It’s designed to divert you for a brief period of time from the absolute hash I’ve made of your future with my feckless choices, cowardice, and greed. Slurp it up, kid, it will quiet your heart and flatten your curiosity. It will parent you in my place, and even though it has no lessons to teach you, it will do a better job. It’s just for you, because it’s fucking horrible and I will not engage with it–because then I’d have to engage with you.” Why so serious? Just let it happen. Tell me how you really feel, I can hear the honking laughter. It sounds like cathedral bells at a funeral.
Anyway, that’s not what you’re here for. You’re here to see me carve this up. That way you can say you had more fun reading my review than you would watching the film, which you never will because you’re too smart and thanks, Walter, for taking the bullet. I don’t want to do that. I want to leave it as it is. It doesn’t need my contribution to it. You don’t need me to confirm your interpretation of it, sight-unseen… Ah, fuck it. You’re here, I’m here, let’s go.
A Minecraft Movie is about how a self-declared loser living as a Macho Man Randy Savage look- and soundalike, running a second-hand store and existing on his brief glory as the Billy Mitchell of a fictional, homoerotic Street Fighter game, has his life justified when he gets sucked into an 8-bit video game. I mean more homoerotic, by the way. That’s one of the main running “jokes” here. See: the “69” sequence in which Steve and this dude Garbage Man (Jason Mamoa) need to Lincoln Log each other to fit through a tight hole. You see what I did there? The main difference is that I didn’t spend $150 million making that joke. Isn’t it funny when straight guys do gay stuff? I remember watching Brokeback Mountain and laughing until I cried. Fuck that’s funny. Don’t you get it? They’re not gay, but they’re doing gay stuff. Your kids will love it, it’s for them. Kids, pay attention: straight men acting gay is extremely funny. Anyway, Steve Jumanjied himself into the Minecraft game at some point in the past, discovering an extraordinary world where he can build anything he wants–and he uses that power to put lava on a chicken or fashion a house out of wool. It’s sort of like Inception, this A Minecraft Movie, in that you have an infinite playground and zero imagination. It’s Burgess Meredith at the end of the “Time Enough at Last” episode of “The Twilight Zone”: all these books, and you’re too far-sighted to read them.
That’s the irony of A Minecraft Movie, right? That it’s the version of The Lego Movie everyone was afraid we would get: a checklist that sees the characters take a straight line through the product catalog, making sure fans will see their favourite things rendered so they can point to them when they recognize them. This is not a form of intelligence, not like playing trivia or something; this is an infant recognizing a stuffed animal. Which my dog can also do, though I would not take him to see A Minecraft Movie because I love my dog. It’s just for kids. Steve is at war with a pig queen called Malgosha (Rachel House) who wants to control “The Orb,” a glowing object that will give her power and whatnot. Steve has the orb, of course–it’s how he got Tronned into this world in the first place. He also has a best friend, Dennis, who is a tame wolf, and there’s a teenager named Natalie (Emma Myers) who’s the guardian of her little brother, Henry (Sebastian Hansen, the spitting image of Lee Curreri circa 1975). Henry is good at making stuff out of stuff and gets bullied for it like kids used to in the ’80s, but aren’t things pretty different nowadays in our modern nerd-verse? Oh yeah, doesn’t matter; it’s just for kids. Natalie and Henry and Garbage Man as well as real estate agent Dawn (Danielle Brooks), who has a mobile-zoo side hustle and enough sass to make up for any shortfall of sass from the rest of the cast, get transported to Minecraft, where they meet Steve and chase/get chased for the orb.
A Minecraft Movie is hardly the worst film I’ve ever seen. I’ll see worse movies this year, probably this week. Probably right now, as you’re reading this. But most “worse” movies aren’t for children–they have that going for them, at least. Although A Minecraft Movie has nothing on its mind and looks like garbage and all that, it has a game cast doing their best, even if their best, in the case of Jack Black and Jennifer Coolidge (as a vice principal horny for one of the game’s grunting/squeaking village NPCs), is their usual shtick cranked up to what getting struck by lightning in a tornado while having a heart attack might feel like. I’ve had enough; your mileage may vary. Look, that fat guy dances good. Look, that quirky woman is drunk and/or crazy. I get it, okay? Uncle. There’s this old gag from “The Simpsons” where Homer’s new barbershop quartet needs a name and so they try to think of something punny that’s hilarious the first time you hear it and then increasingly less funny the more it’s said. I don’t know why that occurred to me. A Minecraft Movie is cynical, workshopped and producer’s-noted to death, and further neutered by the need to avoid offending the overlords of the most popular game in the universe, leaving behind a frictionless scream of obnoxious waste in the service of 100 minutes you will never think of again. Given that we’re in Hell, that’s not a bad deal. Bring on the post-credits surprise cameo. Bring on the sequel. Watch it with the tie-in cereal so you can pretend you’re drowning in it–engulfed from without as you devour it within. Smear your face with it. It’s fine. Relax. It’s just for kids.
