The "A Minecraft Movie" movie is the most reactionary movie I've ever seen and the future zoomer world order is bright and wonderful

I would have called it "The humiliation of the coward Jack Black and the end of irony"

The “A Minecraft Movie” movie is a good movie. It is very different from what was advertised. The exact thing you think it’s going to be when you watch the trailer, is what it is, but it is also something more than that. The movie speaks a strange language, that is both film language, internet language, and something genuine, in a way that is very hard to disentangle and take apart. It’s ironic about being a movie, being a certain kind of movie. It’s ironic about being a video game movie, and it’s especially ironic about being “a Minecraft movie”. But despite that it is not insincere. underneath the obtuse mix of film-language and irony, there is a surprisingly coherent and honest voice of sincerity.

The film opens with Jack Black doing an ironic movie voice-over, explaining how he became the “Steve” character. It is drenched in irony, exactly as you expect it would: he references the internet meme of “children yearn for the mines”, he does his Jack Black thing of screamtalking and STRESSing random sylLABles while making a goofy face. His life story is, he was a loser and unhappy, and then he went to minecraft world and had fun. It goes on a little too long to set up the basic film(tm) plotline for later in the movie, with a evil witch and a mcguffin and some movie stuff to do later.

But after this introduction, when he sends the mcguffin to earth to be found by the main character, the movie’s language changes. It is no longer gen x nihilism, or millennial irony after Jack Black is put in prison in hell, and we change protagonist to Young Zoomer Henry.

The reason the movie resonates with the Zoomers is because it reflects their own life experience back at them, and they pick up on that in a subconscious way even if they can’t articulate it.

The real plot of the movie is that a boy is SUCKED against his will into a RECTANGULAR PORTAL into a world that is HYPER STIMULATING and OVERSATURATED, where the people he meet tells him it is a beautiful world of “creativity”, but it’s actually a really simplistic world of base Id expression and Id satisfaction,

Fuck wrong picture I mean

No sorry my bad I mean

And the person telling him all this, singing (literally) the praises of “creativity”, spinning a yarn about how in the real world, creativity is punished and you are bullied for being “creative”, but in the magical Minecraft alternative dimension world, you can just cum forever express yourself by building houses. Don’t think too hard about how every time you “put down a block” is make a pleasant “plop” sound and it’s clearly stimulating, as every character is expressing extreme joy and the *act* of putting down each block. Not the “creative” part of planning out a project or solving a project, but the mere mechanical task of clicking the button. Anyways the guy telling you all that looks like this:

A fat, slovenly, unwashed, annoying manchild, who is exactly the opposite of what he claims to worship. Jack Blacks character is pure Id expression, because that’s the only thing Jack Black does. He’s childish and base and vulgar, and takes childish pleasure in base things.

The good news is, the movie is in on the joke. The spectacular news is, I don’t think Jack Black is. Either he isnt, or he is a much better actor than I give him credit for, because the whole thing relies on him being himself, and the movie is, on both a literal reading level, and on a meta-interactive-internet level, making fun of Jack Black, both the role Steve and the Actor Jack.

In many other movies like this, this would have been a director with contempt for his audience, but that is not at all what A Minecraft movie does. This is just contempt for Jack Black, and the audience is welcomed to take part in it. On a literal plot level, the antagonist of the movie is some witch pig lady. But on an emotional level, Steve is a villain, the shadow of the protagonist of the movie.

The main character Henry is a genuinely creative and smart kid. This is illustrated by him being able to draw well, and being a literal math genius, who can engineer a functioning rocket from scratch. Jack Black is a “Creative”, which is illustrated by him making silly faces and yelling random nonsense.

This scene literally happens in the movie. Jack black has made a Creative People Chicken Oven, where he roasts chickens with lava

When Henry and the other cast of characters are stuck in minecraft world, they are not actually aided by Steve. They are told that they are, he tells them they are, but at no point in the movie does he ever really help them out of a situation he didnt cause - in fact the whole reason they are stuck in there is Steve’s fault in the first place, for sending the McGuffin to earth. The only act of real “creativity”, creative thinking, in the plot, is near the end when Henry uses a gun he made to utilize a teleportation spell, to shoot it to where they need to go. Jack Black talks on and on about how this is a magical world where you can be creative in, but he is a total hypocrite: what he calls creativity is monotone, autistic “number go up” grinding. He has spent his life in the mines - he has wasted his life playing video games, and the story about creativity is total cope. It takes Zoomer Henry who just arrived yesterday to do the first novel thing in the movie, and combine two unrelated things in a new way that solves a problem they have.

The formal villain of the movie is Malgosha, an evil Witch, who’s backstory is that she was ridiculed by her pig society for wanting to be an expressionist dancer, and so she swore to destroy all “creativity” (that’s the word they use in the movie, over and over), forever, while committing to her culture’s goal of maximizing gold mining. She wants to invade minecraft world to mine their gold and destroy all creativity.

But in this, she is more of a shadow of Steve than of Henry. Henry is never seriously confronted with giving up on his abilities. But Steve’s “creativity” is exactly the same as Malgosha: autistic grinding of some arbitrary resource. And despite her being “the evil witch who forswore Creativity”, she is a magical witch, who has grand plans and schemes, and she even created a weird giant Frankenstein’s monster pig that can shoot laser beams. Seems pretty creative to me! But it is not, of course, “Creative”. Steve, the poster child of “CREATIVITY”, only wears blue shirts - the movie makes multiple jokes hammering this down.

The heroes go on a journey and hunt for the mcguffin, they learn a thing or two about friendship along the way, and they have a big CGI fight between two armies at the end (because that’s what you do in movies now), and then the interesting stuff can happen:

As the portal is repaired and they can go back to IRL, there is not a second of doubt in Henry about whether to go home. When Steve asks him and says, in his jack black irony nihilism voice, “Don’t you want to stay in my magical world with be and Be Creative without Getting Bullied”, Henry is more or less just going “wtf no u pussy. I’m not a fucking coward. what are you talking about”. And Steve is shamed into coming with them, and make something of himself, in the real world. This then all happens as a funny “movie montage”, in the movie language thing. But this is what I mean about it being a strange mix of languages. It uses irony, but only because “thats what films do”, and it speaks film-language, sincerely.

The story ultimately never portrays “the minecraft world” as a good place, but a place of indulgence, of Id expression and satisfaction. Steve is a perverted gross imp, who has lived for 20 years as a NEET indulging himself in base dopamine grinding. He is a gooner. And the film itself utterly rejects him: there is no ambiguity here, the minecraft world is bad, and the real world is what matters. “being creative” in minecraft is shallow and hollow, and is a bad outlet for your talents. The hypersaturated world of hyperreality, of the media-mediated reality that was forced on the zoomers, as their parents plopped a phone or ipad on them as children, is a shallow and hollow mimicry of the real world, and exposing children to “minecraft” at age 9 is not going to make them more “creative”, it is just going to make them into autistic gooners. It is not really a minecraft movie. It is a movie about the zoomer life experience, and a genuine and open confrontation with prior generations. The minecraft branding is arbitrary. The emotional core of the movie, and there truly is a genuine human emotional core, is a genuine inter-generational dialogue. And I say, the reason the zoomers like it, is not some ironic doubly irony joke where they pretend to like a bad movie - that is just what it looks like to millenials, because “that’s what millennials do”. The reason they like it is because they ressonate with a story about being raped by a magical portal that sends you to a fake world you have to escape from. And that is extremely genuine and real, and the movie totally succeeds in expressing something, that possibly haven’t been captured in art before, with the novelty of our technological-historical situation.

The ultimate message of “A Minecraft Movie” is: “The people who made these phones and screens and made sure you had one in your hands at age 6, all have names and addresses.“

And the way it portrays this message is by showing over and over again that Jack Black, as a stand in for gen X nihilism and millennial irony, is totally oblivious, that he doesn’t “get it”, that he is a clown who is not in on the joke.

You could say a million more things about the movie, I am only scratching the surface and talking about my immediate takeaway, the overall thematic coherence of the whole thing, but there is a million things you could dig further into. It’s funny, engaging, and genuine. And Jack Black is not in on the joke. That’s what makes it work and that’s the point, and as the credits rolled in the theater, two zoomers who were leaving turned around and waved and smiled and yelled something to me, and I had no idea what they were saying, and I think that’s beautiful.