"Minecraft Movie" created a troublesome paradox for itself as soon as it came up. It clearly wanted to replicate the success of titles like The LEGO Movie, and as a game-based movie, on the one hand, it wanted to pay homage to the freedom and creativity of Minecraft, but at the same time, it wanted to follow the framework of the game itself, which meant that it had to include all sorts of iconic cube-like visual elements and deliberately add jokes that only players would understand.
The film's most surprising thing is that it delays content that is deliberately pandering to players long enough to give Napoleon director Jared Hess room to play with his own style, and Hess jumped at the chance to subtly incorporate his comic-strip cold humor into the children's fantasy.
This is Hess's first film on a large-scale IP, but it's not the first time he's worked with Jack Black (they've worked together on the funny adventure film "Mad Priest" for 2006 years).
Blake acted quite hard in "The Minecraft Movie" without any suspicion of perfunctory. Steve, who has been "hungry for mining" since he was a child, happily abandons his boring life as an adult when he discovers a portal to the magical "Overworld" while mining. He enjoys life in the Overworld so much that this makes a large portion of his opening credits full of emotion rather than a dry explanation of the setting.
So what's the background? In short, the piglins coveted the "Orb of Domination" that Steve found (but like everything in the Overworld, it was a block, not a sphere), so Steve sent his faithful pet wolf Dennis to hide it in the real world.
Hess put many of his features from the Napoleon period – such as retro clothing and cold-hearted nonsensical humor – into the real world of the film. After the camera shifts to the real world, Hess pauses Steve's storyline to focus instead on Natalie (played by Emma Miles in "Wednesday's "Wolf Sister") and Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen).
The siblings have just moved to a small town in Idaho, where the creative, school-excluded Henry befriended Garrett Garrison (Jason Momoa), a one-time game champion who now runs a decadent retro pop culture thrift store. Meanwhile, Natalie meets Daun (Danielle Brooks), a friendly real estate agent who also runs a sort of "mobile zoo" as a side hustle.
If this were a movie for adults, a whole bunch of quirky settings might be a bit outrageous, such as Natalie, a young woman of unknown age who works at a local potato chip factory and runs a social media account; And Henry can handcraft a fully functional jetpack.
But as a children's film, the settings are cute, hilarious, and even quite distinctive: this kind of earthy flavor with potato balls and alpacas is exactly Hess's style.
Surprisingly, Jason Momoa actually fits in well with Hess's style, and his role is basically the irascible self-defense coach in "Napoleon the Big", but he doesn't like to bully people so much. In fact, the first 40 to 0 minutes of The Minecraft Movie were so full of laughs that I was almost disappointed when Henry, Garrett, Natalie, and Dawn were accidentally sucked into the Overworld by the Ball of Domination.
Eventually, the four of them meet Steve, who provides some standard gameplay instruction for their upcoming adventure. But the adventure is a bit confusing in concept, and it strings together several objectives in a jumble, jumping fashion: saving Steve's wolf Dennis, protecting the Ball of Domination, and finally sending four traversers home.
The frequent incoherence of the plot exposes the fact that "the script was written by six screenwriters" at a glance, such as the fact that several protagonists make a plan and then act out of it, without explaining why, as if the actors are not all in the same version of the script.
The action scenes were also lacking in creativity — hordes of CG enemies were running around, and the scene looked more like a Lord of the Rings fanmovie made from Minecraft — so I don't think Hess would have a chance to get a blockbuster fantasy film in the future.
But "Minecraft Movie" still maintains a brisk and smooth rhythm, constantly inserting comical scenes and exaggerated and hilarious jokes, such as the love scene between Jennifer Kurich and the villagers of the Overworld, this subplot has no impact on the main plot, but it is full of fun.
Eventually, the more hilarious scenes became dominant, and the square-headed characters and animals, as well as the CG scenery, began to look monotonous and repetitive. The footage looks like a high-definition version of a player's playthrough video, except that two more big-name stars are scurrying around in it.
Minecraft Movie lacks the "small details and big world" feel of Minecraft, and while the film tries to tout Minecraft's creative freedom, it doesn't actually capture the addictive charm of the game, but instead focuses on making the Overworld look like a Mario game.
Speaking of Mario, the film is also clearly a reference to Blake's other big game movie, and tries to replicate that film's appeal to children, which becomes especially evident after Blake sings three songs in a row to recreate the popularity of "Brigitte's Song". (Still, it would be nice to let the post-10s experience Blake's goofy rock style a little more.) ）
Like many game-based movies, "Minecraft Movie" fails to combine the best of both the two mediums: movies and games. But adapting the world's best-selling video game into one of Jared Hess's best feature films in many years is a creative endeavour.
As a film produced by a big-name studio and based on a popular video game, "Minecraft Movie" surprisingly gave the director a lot of creative freedom, allowing "Napoleon" director Jared Hess to retain a lot of his personal style. In the first half, Hess cramped some hilarious hilarious sequences into the Overworld adventure, but in the second half, he followed the usual pattern of fantasy adventures that relied heavily on CG. In terms of theme, "The Minecraft Movie" tries to tell the cliché that "your world is yours to create", but Jack Black and Jason Momoa decorate the theme with passionate comedy performances.
This article was compiled from IGN US, originally written by Jesse Hassenger, compiled by Tony, and is not allowed to be reproduced without authorization.