Did "A Minecraft Movie" really deserve to hit the box office?

"This place makes no sense". Luckily, the characters in A Minecraft Movie say it themselves. An adaptation of one of the most famous video games released in 2009, a universe where one can create their own world—as well as being the first title to top historical video game sales charts—Minecraft becomes a movie, or at least what we commonly consider a cinematic work, even if it has neither the look nor the narrative form of one. At the helm is Jared Hess, far from the days of his debut masterpiece Napoleon Dynamite, making us wonder where that brilliant absurdity that defined the 2004 film has gone—probably buried under a stellar budget ($150 million) and screenplays written by ten hands (Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, Chris Galletta). After all, when there are that many writers, it's rarely a good sign.

Creating a story set in a universe as vast as Minecraft’s isn’t easy—a video game where all you have to do is let your imagination run wild and build anything that comes to mind while occasionally trying to survive. But managing to make the same game incomprehensible, failing to explain its goals and only generating confusion is a talent that had yet to be applied so zealously to video game adaptations. So if you were already unfamiliar with the original product, after watching A Minecraft Movie you might leave the theater even more lost than when you entered. In the meantime, the film introduces with a very long prologue (entirely in voice over) the game’s setting, without ever getting to the point. There’s Jack Black jumping from one place to another, wearing light blue turtlenecks, and announcing his departure from the real world because it’s too limiting for his imagination. Then we move to the so-called real world, where two brothers move to a small town in suburban America following the wishes of their late mother and meet a former gamer with a glorious past and victories who now only holds the title of Garbage Man, played by an unlikely Jason Momoa. Then suddenly, everyone is in the over-world, fighting against pigs led by a commander voiced in the Italian version by Mara Maionchi, and they must try to do something in a certain way and in a specific time—but it becomes really hard to say (or understand) anything more than that.

The screenplay is nonexistent in A Minecraft Movie—it’s the most nonsensical thing that could be conceived by one of Hollywood’s major high-budget productions. Maybe it was predictable, given the project’s decade-long and complicated development, in progress since way back in 2012, with a continuous turnover of directors and screenwriters. Even a fan of craziness and pop culture like Shawn Levy (Stranger Things, The Adam Project, Deadpool & Wolverine) ended up turning down the chance to direct the film, choosing instead to create another gaming universe with the vibrant and hilarious Free Guy, where the world of video games is celebrated. Despite the fact that adaptations of such media objects for audiovisual formats are still wobbly—bad adaptations like Borderlands are more common than praiseworthy titles like The Last of Us—A Minecraft Movie has the power to make us apologize to all the video game film adaptations we’ve spoken poorly of until now.