“This ain’t no game.” If the first American movie made from a video game wanted to convey one thing through its marketing campaign, it wasn’t “your favorite avatar pals Mario and Luigi have been made flesh for a big-budget adventure” or even “we got some dinosaurs two weeks before Jurassic Park” but rather that viewers should not, in fact, expect anything like the experience of playing Super Mario Bros. on your Nintendo. This is the real shit: Plumbers, yes, but real guys (if not real Italians), running around real sets (that look like a hellish mallscape), fighting creatures bearing only a hazy, dreamlike resemblance to their eight-bit counterparts. Disney was obviously hoping kids would show up, yet at the same time, it didn’t seem convinced that the youngest demo was dead center of the target audience, either; the company released the movie through its Hollywood Pictures label instead of Disney proper, hoping for something more Who Framed Roger Rabbit (inventive, strange, unifying across generations) than Homeward Bound (stupid animals, no fungi, obviously for diaper babies).
What a difference 30 years makes. When the animated feature The Super Mario Bros. Movie came out in 2023, it might as well have been marketed with “It’s-a definitely like the game!” In the wake of its billion-dollar windfall, as well as the three-for-three financial success of the Sonic The Hedgehog trilogy, video game movies have found a second life as children’s entertainment, serving as companions (or consumer-friendly introductions) to the games in question. Any cinema-fresh ideas in these movies are designed to augment the game iconography and make them more fun for the kids, rather than modifying the source material in a meaningful way. A Minecraft Movie isn’t shy about those aims, even recruiting Super Mario‘s Jack Black to croon additional improvised-sounding songs in hopes of engineering some more meme-like success on the heels of his Bowser-sung “Peaches.”
A long way, then, from video games designed to sate a child’s nascent bloodlust. The first game-based movie to really hit, and still one that maintains a following, was 1995’s Mortal Kombat, with its controversially bloody source material. Now, technically, the adaptation is soft and largely bloodless PG-13 schlock that most eight-year-olds could probably watch without much fuss. (It is also a lot of fun.) But the cultural image of Mortal Kombat was unbridled supernatural pummeling via fists slicked with blood, designed to impress teenage boys, even if director Paul W.S. Anderson established a career-long pattern of extracting whatever B-movie elements of games that interested him, and feeling free to discard the rest like so many extracted spines. His next game-based picture, Resident Evil, was the R-rated version of this phenomenon, with zombie-survival framework that allowed him to riff on Romero, Carpenter, and, eventually, his undying love for his future wife.
Still, violence and, to a lesser extent, sideboob, was the point. Of the dozen-plus video game movies released throughout the 2000s, among the tamest is Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, wherein Angelina Jolie fires two guns while jumping through the air and takes an on-screen shower break. Perhaps the most purely cheerful is DOA: Dead Or Alive, an unsung delight in which feisty, well-tanned model-slash-actresses engage in brightly colored fights, sometimes in bikinis or a towel, courtesy of the late, great Corey Yuen. (Anderson produced, with what one can only assume was gobsmacked awe.) The rest of the era mostly involve zombies (more Resident Evils; House Of The Dead), hellish beasts (Doom; Silent Hill), and/or heavy gunfire (Hitman; Max Payne). When many of those failed to connect with audiences, filmmakers persisted; 2010s video game movies were largely sequels to or reboots of movies from the 2000s, reloading the automatic weapons and firing them anew. It took the one-two punch of Detective Pikachu and Sonic The Hedgehog to reorient the process toward actual children, rather than the thirteen-at-heart.
There hasn’t really been a big, violent game-turned-movie hit since the Resident Evil series ended, by which point it had established itself as its own thing. For the better part of a decade, game adaptations have been softer and cuter. Even Five Nights At Freddy’s was aimed at a younger demo in whatever clumsy way it could muster; in fact, it probably makes more sense as a movie for people who haven’t seen a lot of movies. So the Minecraft film comes at a boom time for kid-friendly game adaptations—as well as a strange moment in children’s entertainment in general, where Generation Alpha is growing up free from the lingering vestiges of older mass media. Older folks might describe YouTube as a repository for everything: music videos (or, shudder, “visuals”), brand-new movie trailers, decades-old shows uncompiled on disc (and sometimes the vintage ads that go along with them), whatever ephemera you’re into. The younger crowd would more likely describe everything as fodder for YouTube: bits and pieces of content assembled in a single convenient channel-flipping (or, now, screen-swiping) location. Even if the venue of choice is actually TikTok or Instagram, the mode of delivery remains mostly the same. This isn’t absolute; kids do still play video games. But this, too, is YouTube fodder; kids looking for a gaming fix can watch other people play Minecraft (or whatever else).
This phenomenon turns an old game-movie adage on its ear. How many times has a critic disdainfully described a movie as akin to watching someone else play a video game? (Answer: Somewhat more than the number of times a critic has disdainfully described a movie as algorithmically generated—for now, anyway.) Though the meaning is clear—detached sensation coupled with mounting frustration, applied to movies that are actually based on games or imitate their aesthetics—the actual technical utility of the comparison is fuzzy. Watching movies is very much watching someone else at play: You’re observing filmmakers and actors marshal great resources in order to play pretend, and give or take a 4DX screen, the experience does not physically involve you. In the 2005 adaptation of Doom, there’s a climactic sequence where the camera takes on the point-of-view of the movie’s last good guy standing as he shoots his way through various monster antagonists. Yes, it’s a shameless attempt at amping up the fans in the audience by giving them a sequence that so closely resembles “real” Doom gameplay, right down to the position of the big gun in the frame. But it’s also an action sequence shot through an unbroken point-of-view shot; technically speaking, it’s more cleverly cinematic than anti-cinema desecration. Is Nickel Boys like watching someone play a game, because you’re experiencing a direct point-of-view you can’t control? Is Edge Of Tomorrow like watching someone play a game, because the characters you can’t control keep respawning?
Obviously there is craft and emotion to those two movies that separate them from that woeful and accurately named Doom, and filmmakers haven’t exactly gone all-in on the blurriness of that line as video games become a reliable source of all-ages blockbuster. Perhaps sensing that Playthrough: The Movie would still alienate ticket-buyers, if not necessarily those they’d be buying the tickets for, A Minecraft Movie settles on preaching the power of imagination—specifically, the power of imagination as wielded by players of Minecraft, which is perhaps a more specific form of creativity than the movie is willing to admit. The movie does, however, allow director Jared Hess to impose nearly as much of his sensibility on the material as the Paul W.S. Anderson game-movies. This is especially true in its first half, when it’s essentially a less strange but still amusing variation on his indie hit Napoleon Dynamite (in other words: tots, alpacas, and young misfits, dotting the Idaho landscape). It feels more like a movie made by people than that Mario Bros. cartoon, that’s for sure.
Yet there’s still something constricted and boxed-in about A Minecraft Movie, and not just because it so obviously exists to further the reach of what is already an all-time bestseller. Those YouTube videos watched by kids are, to the parents of those kids at least, either torturously boring or boringly torturous, depending on the length and the amount of screaming involved. But they do speak to the strange flexibility of the Minecraft landscape: It can be full of manic challenges, meticulously crafted modifications, obsessive pursuits of some obtuse yet supposedly entertaining goal—or something you can play silently by yourself for hours. A Minecraft Movie pursues a pretty standard fantasy quest with an overlay of comedy; though its young hero is told he can build whatever he imagines, there’s no real tensions within the game-copying landscape, outside of the usual good-guys-versus-bad-guys slapstick skirmishes and a few whimsical weapons. Imagine a movie that explores, say, the basic differences between survival mode and creative mode, drilling into the interlocking reasons people play with pixelated virtual blocks in a video game in the first place.
A Minecraft Movie doesn’t need to get that existential, of course. But in its prescriptive yet vague treatment of “imagination,” it’s not so much more sophisticated than the horrifying likes of last year’s Harold And The Purple Crayon movie, albeit with Jack Black and Jason Momoa providing much heartier (which is to say, existent) laughs along the way. And there’s far more sense of whimsical, game-inspired playfulness in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves or The Lego Movie, the new geek faves that future toy-and-game-assigned filmmakers will likely delude themselves into thinking they’ve made.
Superficially, the new movie’s framework more directly engages with Minecraft as a game than the 2000s game movies that mostly sought to get a branded stamp on a series of junky action-horror hybrids, leaving fans of both genre movies and games feeling neglected. But when Paul W.S. Anderson locks into the B-movie logistical challenges of Monster Hunter or Corey Yuen uses DOA as an excuse to make the 87-minute Crouching Charlie, Hidden Angels of his dreams, the movies can blur that line more interestingly, possibly unintentionally. It’s like experiencing someone playing (whether video games or with a cinematic train set) through their eyes—an unofficial POV shot of which strange sensations get the filmmakers excited. The silliest, Jared Hess-iest moments of A Minecraft Movie are like a gentler iteration of that; so do the vacuous two-hour videos of 19-year-olds breathlessly monetizing their screams of “LET’S GOOOO!”
The new kid-friendly game movies are less schlocky than the worst of their decades-ago ancestors. What they’re still missing are the feelings connected to these games, ones that deviate from the pre-approved advertising copy to convey a greater range of experiences. Like their counterparts in other age groups and types of media, kids form attachments to these games that can be inspiring or troubling, creative or mind-numbing, sometimes simultaneously. The current crop of kid-friendly game adaptations want to capitalize on that obsessiveness without ever daring to turn it into the subject.
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