A Minecraft Movie is fine. It’s not a surprise subversive treat like The Lego Movie, nor an unwatchable dirge, but much like 2023's The Super Mario Bros. Movie, it lands firmly in the region of “fine.” My 10-year-old enjoyed it (with qualifications), as did the many other kids around us. It’s also an astonishing success, almost doubling its already optimistic opening weekend sales, making over $300m worldwide. And you know what? It does this while having a pretty solid message about toxic masculinity.
After the first trailer for A Minecraft Movie appeared, certain quarters of the internet reacted deeply unpleasantly. Certainly the trailer was widely disliked, enough that the studio responded with a different approach in future trailers in an attempt to calm concerns, but not—thankfully—to appease the more grim reactions, those that were more focused on the movie featuring a woman of color and a man in a pink jacket, because...[waves arms in all directions].
Thus, watching the film at the cinema (we’re British, so there) this weekend with my wife and son, I was rather delighted to notice that the evil spidey-senses of that bunch must have been tingling, because this was a film that had something to say about them: that they’re a gross embarrassment. And it wasn’t the least bit subtle about it. (There are spoilers to follow, but few events in the movie are going to take you by surprise.)
Jason Momoa’s character in A Minecraft Movie is not subtle. He is Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, a washed-up guy in his 40s, once briefly and nichely famous in 1989 after becoming champion at a particular arcade game. He now runs a failing video game store, still trying to play off this decades-past glory, unable to understand why the world doesn’t view him as the champion he needs to be.
Jack Black’s character, Steve, is far more opaque. I have very many criticisms of this movie, all the reasons why it never climbs above the ranks of “fine,” and the weird lack of character establishment or development of Steve is high among them. It’s all extremely light and silly, but at the cost of any of his actions or decisions having weight. We’re told that as a kid all he wanted to do was mine, but we’re also told that this means all he wanted to do was create, as if one equates to the other. But anyway, rather fortuitously, as an adult he stumbles upon a cuboid orb that opens a portal to the Overworld where mining is a way to be creative, and makes his home there. Years later he’s captured in the Nether by a bad Piglin lady, and to prevent her destroying the Overworld, sends the orb back to our world via his pet wolf, Dennis. This sets up a way for Garrison, along with a boy (Henry) and his older teenager sister (Natalie), and a realtor (Dawn), to all accidentally end up in the Overworld and go on a Minecraft-themed adventure. Phew.
But what happens almost straight away, as the peril of the Piglin invasion makes itself known, is that the group is split in half. Garrison, Steve and Henry in one splinter, Dawn and Natalie in the other. And at first this looks like a weirdly regressive bit of storytelling, with the male characters using crafting tables to make weapons and planning to fight, while the female characters rush around trying to reason with Villagers to get a map. I remember thinking how odd this was, like The Famous Five having George and Anne do the washing up in the stream while Dick and Julian plan how to defeat the dastardly robbers. Yet, it was setting up something more clever.
Crucially, and almost immediately, both Dawn and Natalie are bashing Piglins like badasses, Natalie discovering an unrealized skill for combat. But at the same time, Steve and Garrison are butting heads, Garrison fighting Steve to become the alpha. Steve knows what he’s doing, has survived for years in here, but Garrison finds this threatening, and repeatedly messes things up in his attempts to prove himself the better man.
So far, so cliche. The arrogant fool is hardly a novel character trope, and we know the pattern: they mess up enough times until it has actual, serious consequences, then have to face up to their folly and accept their realistic status. They’re taken down a few pegs, realize they’re not the best, and we all get a vicarious win through their humbling. Except, that’s not exactly what happens here.
When the group finally turns fully on Garrison, it’s not because they’re all now in a deadly predicament he’s caused, but rather because they’ve just had enough of him. They hit him with some very hard truths. They tell him how selfish he is, how self-absorbed he is, how he is the worst person to be around. And in that moment, he breaks down. But, again, not in a manipulative way, not the cliche. Instead he just faces his reality.
He sobs, he’s broke, he’s failed at everything he’s tried for decades, and most of all, he has no friends. And then there’s the movie’s most heartbreaking line: Henry says to him, “You had a friend in me.”
There is so much talk right now about “what’s wrong with men.” People taking seriously the extremely serious statistics that show suicide as being the number one cause of death in men under 40. People trying to understand why toxic masculinity has such a grip on the zeitgeist, and why it’s being so poorly combated. And while a lot of this discussion has become ironically narcissistic and self-justifying (“actually men do have it really hard, so this behavior is OK”), the calm, methodical research keeps coming back to the same issue: these men not having friends. Real friends, people they can be vulnerable with, share their struggles with, people they’re willing to let support them.
In the moment that Garrison is vulnerable, Steve becomes his friend. And, he’s not magically cured! He’s almost immediately a douchebag right after this. But he’s beginning to allow himself to change.
It’s interesting to contrast this with the movie’s best plot, the C or D-plot of Jennifer Coolidge’s relationship with a Villager who accidentally finds his way into our world. He doesn’t talk in English, because he’s a Villager, and after hitting him with her car, Coolidge asks him out on a date. And, once again, here the film avoids the cliche. (Please note the film does not avoid a hundred other cliches; I’m just interested that in these two mirroring storylines.) This is also an over-worn storyline, the barely sentient character who’s viewed as the “perfect man” because he doesn’t say or do anything, so the self-obsessed woman can just talk at him and project her own ideal responses onto him. It’s usually wildly misogynistic, a “women be like” trope to be condemned. Except, that’s not what happens here.
The Villager is genuinely a really nice guy! He may not be able to speak, and the movie certainly does go for the obvious “You’re such a good listener!” lines, but he’s actively responsive to Coolidge (I’m sure her character had a name, but this is Jennifer Coolidge, so it’s Jennifer Coolidge being the character she plays so well), accepting of her advances, and most of all, actively interested in what she’s saying! All through facial expressions, we’re left in no doubt that he’s very happy with this situation, very happy to be the listener, and as such, exists to represent the very opposite cartoonish extreme of Momoa’s character. (And, for goodness sakes, stay for the first of the credits scenes to see the wonderful punchline to all this.)
The Villager—as silly as I feel over-analyzing this very daft sub-plot—is being a lovely guy! He’s not unaware, not being walked over, not a sap or a victim. He’s on what seems to be, for him, a great date! Where Garrison only talks, the Villager only listens.
So for all its weird, half-empty storytelling, and the failure to have Steve be anything other than Jack Black shouting like Jack Black shouts, and the atrociously thrown-away story behind Rachel House’s Piglin boss, Malgosha, and the impossibly weird decision not to have Dawn form an army of Overworld animals for the big battle (surely that was the entire point of her character arc?), and on and on and on, I really appreciated A Minecraft Movie for its loud opinions on toxic masculinity, and the need for men to have friends. There’s a moment, right near the end, in which Garrison just openly says he wants a male friend his age.
As a 40-someone who had accidentally become the husband who knows his wife’s friends, rather than having local friends to hang out with of his own, I’m acutely aware of that loneliness. I also, a year or so back, gathered the courage to say to a couple of guys I know, as weird and awkward as it felt, “I’d like to be friends.” The first person I asked rejected it, “Yeah, sure, I’ll WhatsApp you...” to silence. That sucked. That hurt. But the second couple of people: I meet up with them each once a week for coffee, and we shoot the shit, talk about the insanity of the world, get over-excited about TV shows we just saw, and tell each other what we’re struggling with. And I’m so much better for it.
I love the moments of vulnerability shown by Garrison in A Minecraft Movie. Yes, he’s an outlandish caricature, but they’re the film’s only honest scenes (in the Overworld, at least—the early stuff set in the real world establishing Natalie and Henry’s recently orphaned lives is so good that I wished I’d gone to see that Jared Hess movie). It’s not a redemption scene, but rather a scene about a man being willing to tell a difficult, vulnerable truth, and it’s what allows him to begin to put his life back together. And most of all, to have male friends.
I know many have criticized the film for its central message of “keep your creativity” for being over-used. This entirely forgets that the movie’s target audience is too young to have already heard it dozens of times, and oh god, how are adults all so incapable of remembering this? I love it for that. But I also love it for how it just so clearly says, “Boys, you need friends too.” That’s a brave, bold message.
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