“A Minecraft Movie” Is a Tale of Two Cinematic Universes

I’ve never played Minecraft in my life—but then I’m not a Christian, either, and have always delighted in the distinctly Mormon cinematic universe of Jared Hess, the director of “A Minecraft Movie.” He’s best known for “Napoleon Dynamite,” from 2004, which evokes its spiritual milieu only implicitly, by the absence of secular pop culture and of teen-age ribaldry. He followed it with “Nacho Libre,” starring Jack Black as a friar who enters the wrestling ring to save a convent, and, in 2009, with “Gentlemen Broncos,” a celestial gross-out vision of an adolescent gospel. His satire “Don Verdean,” from 2015, is explicitly set in church communities and involves relic smuggling in Israel; his 2016 comedy, “Masterminds,” is a heist film that’s centered on grace and holy innocence.

With “A Minecraft Movie,” I was impatient to see what Hess would do with another world of extreme fantasy, akin to that of “Gentlemen Broncos.” The short answer is, too much and not nearly enough; the I.P. is the boss, the characters are its minions, and Hess—constrained both by a script that he didn’t write and by the demands of complex C.G.I.—struggles to live up to his own œuvre, which is among the most substantially loopy (or loopily substantial) in modern cinema. “A Minecraft Movie,” which moves between realistic settings and the video game’s synthetic worlds, is nowhere near as wildly idiosyncratic, as imaginatively crafted, or as deeply personal as his other features. It’s no “Barbie”; the action is blatantly promotional and brazenly conventional. Nonetheless, it’s got enough personality to make me wish that Hess had had a still freer hand.

Here’s what I’ve gleaned about the source material: in the game, players mine raw materials and use them, in a realm of boundless possibilities called Overworld, to craft more or less whatever they want. But the realm faces many varieties of threats, including creatures called Piglins from a nihilistic underworld, so players must battle to defend what they create. (The Minecraft universe also mimics the lo-fi graphics of earlier generations of games, leaving its entities rectilinear and pixellated—even an object called the Orb is depicted as a cube.)

In the movie, Jack Black plays a bored doorknob salesman named Steve, a character based on the original default Minecraft avatar; the action begins when Steve leaves his job and, pursuing a lifelong dream, heads for the local mine. There, he discovers the movie’s MacGuffins, the Orb of Dominance and the Earth Crystal—and promptly gets blasted from this world into the Overworld. But his joyful, freewheeling creativity is thwarted by the head Piglin, Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House), who seeks the two objects in order to control the Overworld; to protect it, Steve enlists Dennis, a wolf he’s encountered and tamed, to carry them back home and hide them under his bed. Years later, Garrett (the Garbage Man) Garrison (Jason Momoa), the bombastically scruffy owner of a grungy video-game store in the small Idaho town of Chuglass, buys the long-absent Steve’s stuff at auction—and, instead of acquiring the vintage Atari he expected, comes up with the Orb and Crystal.

Then two siblings, Natalie (Emma Myers) and Henry (Sebastian Hansen), move to Chuglass, to fulfill their mother’s dying wish. Henry, a science prodigy, tries to ward off bullies at his new high school by creating a jet pack—which, through no fault of his own, causes a serious accident. He hides in Garrett’s store and, with the Orb and the Crystal, accidentally blasts himself and Garrett into the Overworld. Natalie and a real-estate agent named Dawn (Danielle Brooks), in search of the missing Henry, make their way to the Overworld, too, and the four team up with Steve in a painfully generic adventure to fight off monsters, find another Crystal, save the Overworld (and Dennis), and get back home.

Don’t mistake my curiosity for enthusiasm. I can’t recommend that anyone see “A Minecraft Movie,” not even a child. (I’m trying, in vain, to imagine the kind of childhood I didn’t have, in which I might have found such a movie entertaining.) The movie is self-evidently replete with Easter eggs and in-jokes for Minecraft regulars; at one viral moment, viewers yell “Chicken Jockey!” (as they did at my local multiplex on Sunday), in one instance reportedly doing so with such vehemence that police were called to the scene. But what held my attention, however intermittently, was another set of references planted throughout the film—to the Jared Hess cinematic universe. If the connections go widely unacknowledged, that’s only because Hess’s body of work has been unduly ignored by most critics, let alone viewers.

The Idaho setting is both personal—Hess grew up there—and a nod to “Napoleon Dynamite,” with which “A Minecraft Movie” shares a trove of details, including a llama, a martial-arts school, and, above all, Tater Tots. (Like Napoleon, Henry stashes them in his pocket—then, in the fantasy realm of Minecraft, he uses them as ammunition for a weapon he creates, a “tot launcher.”) The teen inventor Henry, filling his notebooks with his designs and schemes, harks back to Napoleon and, even more, to Benjamin, the prodigious adolescent sci-fi-writer protagonist of “Gentlemen Broncos.” (Jennifer Coolidge, who plays the vice-principal of Henry’s high school, also played Benjamin’s mother.) Hess’s world is one of orphans and bereavement—Napoleon is being raised by his grandmother; Jack Black’s friar in “Nacho Libre” reminisces about his late parents; Benjamin’s writing is based on his late father—and “A Minecraft Movie” is set in motion, however vaguely, by the death of the two youths’ mother.

But Hess’s most distinctive creation in “A Minecraft Movie” is the character of Garrett (or, as Steve calls him, Gar-Gar), who’s more or less a composite of figures appearing throughout Hess’s œuvre. Like Napoleon’s Uncle Rico, who dwells on his long-ago high-school-football days, Garrett is living in the faded aura of past glory: in his case, a 1989 video-game championship. His misbegotten quest for a relic recalls “Don Verdean”; his long hair and beard, his high-style-but-low-rent costumes, and his grandiloquent manner bring to mind the many iterations of the Christlike warrior-hero of Benjamin’s story “Yeast Lords,” from “Gentlemen Broncos.”

Garrett has fingernails with black nail polish, rainbow streaks on his wraparound shades, fluorescent pink clothing, and a keen nose for perfume. The queer-coded and homoerotic innuendo of his words and deeds harks back to the era of Howard Hawks, as when he calls himself “a better sister” to Henry than Natalie is, and when he flies Steve (via Overworld wings) through a tight hole while they’re firmly grappled together face to crotch. Garrett’s own quest isn’t especially Minecraft-centric; he needs money to save his failing store, and—for reasons unspecified—he’s something of a friendless loner. But he’s the movie’s wild card, a character with deep-rooted traits, a story, and a realm of possibilities that reach far beyond the narrow, rushed narrative and invite a movie of his own.

Hess, in his earlier films, displayed a refined sense of comic timing, of scenes that hold long enough and are framed cannily enough to convey a sense of wondrous observation. There’s no room for any such aestheticism in “A Minecraft Movie.” Neither the references, allusions, echoes, and reprises with which he stuffs it nor even the intriguing but undeveloped character details make for a satisfying viewing experience; rather, they turn the movie into a coded letter to let those who care about his artistic well-being know that he’s O.K. In the absence of such winks and nods, the film would play like a high-budget hostage video. With apologies to a work of far more earnest intent, Hess’s “A Minecraft Movie” could have been titled “I’m Still Here.” ♦