‘A Minecraft Movie’: Some sparkle, but lacks Redstone power

Every generation needs its bloated big-screen extravaganzas that box the human cast within mammoth green-screen walls that eventually become uncanny CGI environments. Late millennials and early Gen Z had “Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over” and “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl.” The latter generation received the tail end of the 3D craze with “Alice in Wonderland,” “Avatar” and those Disney live-action remakes. Now it’s time for Generation Alpha to get its dose with “A Minecraft Movie.”

Based on what list you consult, “Minecraft” is the highest-selling video game of all time (it’s hard to define the dozens of versions of “Tetris” and decide if they should be counted together). Released in 2011 by Mojang Studios, the game is a 3D sandbox-style world made of procedurally generated blocks. There are no goals, missions or objectives, just a virtually infinite space to cater to any “What if” question that pops into your head. I intermittently played the game for a few years when it first came out and loved its casual and inviting nature. There’s a great deal of fulfillment when you are the master of your own destiny.

Unfortunately, that level of full-fledged freedom cannot be replicated on the silver screen. There must be story beats to follow, characters to root for and trinkets to market. So, the six credited screenwriters have come up with the usual “band of lonely misfits find themselves in a strange land and discover the power of family” storyline. Hey, it worked for “The Goonies” and the “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise, so why mess with a good formula?

Things start in Idaho, which gets the kind of glowing endorsement one would usually expect from a Hollywood blockbuster. In the small, potato chip-fueled town, we meet the recently orphaned brother-sister duo Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and Natalie (Emma Myers), washed-up arcade game champion Garrett Garrison (Jason Momoa), and side-hustle extraordinaire Dawn (Danielle Brooks). Henry is your typical misunderstood gifted kid, with Natalie as the older sibling who had to grow up too fast and be the adult in this situation (just don’t ask how she was able to buy a house when she looks as if she just graduated high school).

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This perfunctory opening act is just to set the table and let us know that everyone is down on their luck and in need of a change of scenery. That comes both literally and figuratively when they all go through a portal into the Overworld, the setting for the video game. In this cube-based world lives Steve (Jack Black), who left the real world behind years ago and has been thriving on his creativity ever since.

It’s hard to determine if the special effects are successful. On the one hand, the replication of the video game is pretty spot-on. On the other hand, seeing a semi-realistic rendering of animated characters and landscapes on an IMAX screen is inherently off-putting, kind of like all those AI-generated images of characters from “The Simpsons” as real people. The live-action aspect was a flawed idea from the beginning, trapping the actors in a black box theater style of performance that certainly didn’t suit them.

Black makes it out OK, his lovably braggadocious swagger helping him accomplish his sole task of explaining every facet of this world in the most juvenile way possible. You get as much mileage here out of Momoa as you did with his “Aquaman” films, of which I was no fan. Like most of the leads in the Disney live-action films, the kids have decent faces for reactions, but not any skills when it comes to delivering lines.

There’s some semblance of a plot involving a sky beam and the world ending, but I didn’t care enough to remember. Children and more hardcore players of the game will be able to put it all up on a whiteboard for you, highlighting why that random pig was wearing a crown and the importance of that random blink-and-you’ll-miss-it background actor. The promotional material blatantly tells everyone to turn off their brains and just enjoy the ride, so you might as well do that.

Warner Bros. will release “A Minecraft Movie” in theaters nationwide on April 4.

Eden Prairie resident Hunter Friesen is a film critic who owns and operates The Cinema Dispatch, a website where he writes reviews, essays, and more. He currently serves as the president of the Minnesota Film Critics Association and travels the globe covering film festivals both big and small. To view his entire body of work, you can visit his website and Instagram.