Watching “A Minecraft Movie” was bad enough to make me reconsider being overly positive—but a good night’s sleep and a conversation reminded me why I shouldn’t be hateful.
If you know me, you know that I’m a pretty generous person when it comes to praise. Even with contentious media that many people use as the butt end of jokes, like Fortnite or Five Nights at Freddy’s, I find a way to stay positive. In addition, I’m pretty often found playing subpar games or enjoying slop media, such as my urge to watch low count videos that I’m recommended or my current playtime in Fortnite Ranked Ballistics (and if you don’t know what it is, just imagine a roblox recreation of CS:GO). The general idea is that if you’re looking for someone to bear with you through a horrible television show for an unreasonable amount of time, then I’m your girl.
And then I watched “A Minecraft Movie” yesterday with a couple of friends.
In my opinion, the movie is quite possibly one of the worst things I’d ever watched. The pacing is ruined by an almost 30 minute exposition period for a 90 minute runtime that requires the rest of the development to feel rushed, as well as suffering from poorly written dialogue that puts the characters on stilts and fitting them into cartoonish stereotypes. The jokes are often dated and incredibly easy to anticipate, as well as the references being devoid of love for the source material. The ending of the story (spoilers ahead, obviously. Although it isn’t unexpected) is confusing—with a hero’s journey set with the Minecraft world, you’d anticipate the ending of them returning to their original world. However, no push is provided to encourage this—the Minecraft world proves rather safe in comparison to what you’d expect, and all the characters lack familial or personal motivation to return to a world that had beaten them down. With a freely open portal and plenty of reasons to stay or even return to the Overworld, the main characters instead opt to return solely to the real world, even convincing Steve to leave after his extended stay. I can write a massive, scathing review of this movie as a failure of media. I considered as much before I went to bed.
This morning, I woke up to a text thread from some friends who enjoyed their watch.
It was this that got me to curb my response to a point as I discussed it with them. I still presented my arguments and my personal issues with the film, but they also had an opportunity to share the things they enjoyed during their theater experience. It was their perspective that made me realize that even though I wanted to enjoy the movie, the failure to have that enjoyment was not inherently a failure of the movie. These friends were given a couple other benefits to their experience—they enjoyed a theater of happy kids that were enjoying the references and laughing often, but my experience was only a couple of friends who were all in less cheerful moods. The perspectives we had were very different in ways that I realized I couldn’t replicate, which brings me to what I really realized thinking about my movie experience.
The situations of every media are different, but that goes for every person regardless of personality. The situation and time and surroundings towards an experience can always change the way that we interact with it and will inevitably leave everyone with different impressions, something that means that even people with very similar tastes can end up coming away with conflicting opinions. I think that my opinion on “A Minecraft Movie” can be reasonable and valid, but the opinion cannot be the end of the explanations of the movie. Even if my opinions can be developed in a less biased way that applied more objectively, the objective review of “A Minecraft Movie” still cannot change the subjective experience of someone who enjoyed it more than the objective stance would have led them to believe. With the abstraction of my subjective opinion towards another’s, there’s many different factors that lead someone to enjoy what I didn’t or hate what I did. It’s a reminder to myself as to why I work to be positive towards media as often as I can.
Because like we’ve all been taught, it costs nothing to be a kind person. While the abstraction of experience and subjective opinion can make something good or bad depending on the person, there’s no downsides to showing positive opinions of something compared to being negative about it. It was something I learned picking up Destiny 2—there’s a thousand people out there that’ll talk about how much they hate it and how dumb it is and that the mechanics are awful. These people, some of whom I’ve had telling me this during play sessions where they are also playing, do nothing but make the experience of enjoying something I like more embarrassing and awkward. Expressing negativity is an intrinsic trait we find easy to do, but the actual benefit of it is way more nuanced and infrequent than positivity.
So even if I have a very negative view of “A Minecraft Movie,” I really am happy that people got to have a good time with it. I’m glad that the movie brought a lot of joy, and I’m sure there will be plenty of memes and other cultural references that we’ll all be able to laugh about as we wait for a sequel. I’m going to work on being even more positive—I want to vocalize my opinions every so often, but I always want to lean on the side of positivity as opposed to my negative experiences. I’d encourage you all to do the same—ranting on about things you didn’t like about a show or game might make you feel a bit better, but there’s a chance people don’t agree and your perspective will make them feel worse for enjoying something that you didn’t. No matter the state of the world, people deserve to feel joy in their lives about things they enjoy.
And I’ll be honest, that second knife did make me laugh pretty hard.