![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
game over world
Jan. 12th, 2026 05:27 pm“Turns out, if you're brave enough, you can make the real world… your Overworld.”
As Jack Black would say, my son yearns for the mines. He’s 2.8 years old and loves A Minecraft Movie. He stands on top of our living-room coffee table shouting CHICKEN JOCKEY and singing the Lava Chicken song. And he asks to watch the movie every day.
And that’s fine. It entertains him, which is a hard thing to do considering he’s inherited all my worst attention-deficit qualities, meaning, for me, the movie is a brief respite from his normal hyperactive madness. But by extension, considering he watches the movie every day, I've watched A Minecraft Movie maybe six hundred times by now, or at least it’s felt that way, because, despite its fairly standard runtime, it’s an excruciatingly torturous experience that feels much longer than it actually is. This is especially true on rewatches, when you start to notice how the plot is totally contrived, how most of the characters exist for no real reason, and how the pacing resembles my son’s own hyperactive thought-process, which is probably why he likes the movie so much. For example, the first forty-five minutes of the film, before they even enter the Minecraft world, are set in the real world, introduce a bunch of characters that do not matter to the plot whatsoever, and play out like a poor recreation of Napoleon Dynamite, cutting from one weird scene to another very quickly, complete with forced-quirky humor that feels like it was focus-grouped in the early 2000s, with lines delivered by middle-aged women like, “You can bag me up and take me to the curb anytime, but you gotta bungee the lid 'cause I got a lot of raccoons in there,” which feels highly inappropriate considering this is a fucking kids’ movie.
I don’t really want to harp on all the problems with the movie because there are way too many to count, and because that’s not really the point of this journal entry, and also because A Minecraft Movie is a kids’ movie first and foremost, so who the fuck actually cares. But I feel it’s important to let you know that this same take-me-to-the-curb woman later becomes romantically involved with a Minecraft villager who has a huge nose and massive block head that look as if human flesh has been stretched way too tightly over them, and he communicates only in creepy, sometimes pained grunts. The whole thing amounts to total nightmare fuel. In fact, most of the CGI in this movie is total nightmare fuel, as all the denizens of the Minecraft world have fleshy, real-world texturing over their clearly video-game-like block bodies, sometimes with nasty little hairs poking out here and there, which makes for some seriously unsettling imagery that could have only come from the mind of one seriously disturbed individual, presumably Jared Hess, the director, who also directed, you guessed it, Napoleon Dynamite.
Of course, much like the first forty-five minutes of A Minecraft Movie and the weird interspecies-romance subplot, everything I’ve typed up so far is pretty much irrelevant to both the plot of the movie and the point I’m trying to make with this journal entry, which is that, despite being a video-game movie made for kids, it tries to shoehorn what I feel is a very anti-kids message, which is what I'm about to get into here. And this message disturbs me because it mirrors something that I think about and wrestle with literally every day. It is something that I think no child should be forced to think about, especially when they just tuned in to watch Jack Black do funny things in a world inspired by their favorite video game, Minecraft.
But before I can analyze the overall message of the film, which is actually very deliberate, not something the script accidentally stumbles into, I have to provide some background for two of the more important characters.
The first important character is, of course, Steve. Steve’s story is one of escapism. The movie opens with a montage of Steve throughout the years. He starts as a young child who, for whatever reason, yearns for the mines, observing them from afar, dreaming of the day when he can get into those caves and do some digging or whatever. But before long, real life kicks in, and suddenly Steve, now a grotesque fat man in his thirties, is a paper pusher at some corporate office, depressed and without purpose. “My name is Steve. And as a child, I yearned for the mines. But it didn't really work out. So, I did a terrible thing. I grew up.” Toward the end of the montage, Steve has a little epiphany, so he quits his job to follow his dream. From that point, he spends all his free time mining in a nearby quarry, eventually unearthing a glowing blue cube, the Earth Crystal, which opens a portal to the Overworld, i.e. the Minecraft world, where he spends the next several years mining, crafting, and building stuff, basically escaping his real-world responsibilities. In the Overworld, he makes a wolf friend named Dennis, and at some point, he discovers an underworld full of pig-like monsters commanded by Malgosha, an evil piglin sorceress. Things happen and Malgosha captures Steve, demanding that he give her the Earth Crystal so that she can take over the universe or whatever, but Steve refuses, sending Dennis off with the Earth Crystal to hide it in the real world beyond the portal. This leads into the start of the movie, where the whole Napoleon Dynamite rip-off kicks in.
The second important character is Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, played by that same guy who did Game of Thrones and Aquaman or whatever, Jason Momoa. Before the events of the film, he was a child video-game prodigy, having won many video game tournaments and corporate sponsorships, which set him up for financial success and inflated his ego to an absurd degree. However, by the start of the film, he’s squandered all his sponsorship money and is now a washed-up, overweight, mullet-wearing middle-aged man who owns a retro video game store aptly named “Game Over World.” Maybe you can see where this is going. His store is filled to the brim with old stuff from his youth: classic video game consoles, arcade cabinets, ancient CRTs, retro boomboxes, that sort of stuff. One gets the impression that Garrett is a nostalgia junkie obsessed with his childhood. He’s much like that one character from Napoleon Dynamite, the ex-football-player uncle who points at the far-off mountains and says, “How much you wanna bet I can throw a football over them mountains?” Both of these characters live in the past, refusing to move on from their glory days. In fact, all Garrett ever talks about is how he was once the greatest video-game player in the world, which is played for laughs, as Garrett does have some self-awareness about his situation, constantly trying to downplay his boasting by pretending that he doesn’t actually care: “Gamer of the Year, 1989. Whatever. I barely think about it.” Yet despite this, he’s started a mentorship program for people who want to “win at the game of life,” using his own life as a model, even though his own life is in shambles because he is stuck, unable to move on from his glory days. Now, his store is being foreclosed on, and his obnoxious arrogance has made him few friends. After a series of incredibly stupid events, he stumbles into the Minecraft world, where he quickly realizes that he can use Minecraft-world diamonds to make a profit and thus save his soon-to-be-foreclosed retro game store, Game Over World.
Watching this movie, as an adult man in his thirties, I am reminded of my own follies. This is what so disturbs me about the film. In Garrett, I see myself. In Steve, I see myself. This may sound ridiculous, considering this is a kids’ movie for kids, but it is true nevertheless. Like Garrett, my office is my Game Over World. I have games in here from my childhood, from the early 2000s, collecting dust on bookshelves and tables, like a shrine to my youth. In a drawer just to the left of me: jewel-case copies of all the PlayStation Final Fantasy games, Chrono Cross, Arc the Lad, and SaGa Frontier; original Xbox games in their cheap plastic cases, like Panzer Dragoon, Halo, Mega Man Anniversary, and Morrowind; even some old issues of Nintendo Power from the days when I wore a bowl cut. Even further left, on a wooden table that holds my Xbox 360 and Nintendo Switch, old 360 games stand upright between bookends: Fable, Skyrim, Orange Box, Blue Dragon, Oblivion, and more. Next to that, favorite DVDs I’ve had since I was a rebellious teenager: the whole Cowboy Bebop collection, Lost in Translation, the entire Boondocks series, the movie Collateral starring Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise, and so on, all stacked atop each other, their spines facing out, creating a border of nostalgia around the one thing that helps me escape reality: the television set.
Like Steve, I find myself inexplicably drawn to the television, becoming sucked into the pixely glow. I try to fight it, tell myself that gaming has run its course, that it doesn’t bring me the same pleasure it once did, that I could be doing anything else with my time, but night after night I still find myself sitting there, in front of the screen, burning my retinas with the colors of escapism. There is no moderation in my hobbies. I play till ungodly hours. I eschew other things I’d like to be doing, like reading and writing, to stare into this nostalgic glow. I have reached an age where the act of playing video games triggers thoughts of wasted time and irresponsibility, yet there I am, night after night, still doing it, still playing the games, surrounded by all the old things I love. I foster times and places redolent of those long past, not to remind me of them, but to hide within them. I do this every night, to forget, or perhaps to run away from, what I have become, what we all eventually become.
They say age is just a number, that you can be young forever, but at a certain age, the shadow of responsibility catches up with you, and before you know it, maturity has slain the child inside. Your thinking changes, becomes more pragmatic and wise, and while this is enlightening in some ways, it is also scary as hell. What am I to do with myself? Who am I to become? Am I contributing to society in a meaningful way? What is a “meaningful way,” actually? Why do I tell myself that it doesn’t matter when I know, deep down, that it does? The nihilistic excuses start slipping away, replaced by some vague feeling of expectations being missed, but these expectations are not the expectations of your parents, or your teachers, or your boss, but of someone else entirely: you. They are your own expectations, dormant for years, coming to greet you. And the greeting is most unwelcome.
In this way, it is not A Minecraft Movie that disturbs me, but this: my own maturity.
But herein lies my problem with A Minecraft Movie. It is not that the movie has poor pacing, or that the writing is frankly abysmal, or all the weird sexual innuendos, or even the fleshy block people, or how everything looks obviously green-screened. It is that the movie, which is targeted toward kids, tries hard to make the very kids watching it grow up.
By the end of the movie, as you might imagine, both Steve’s and Garrett’s shadow catches up with them, they mature, they end up renouncing their old escapist ways, abandoning the Minecraft world, which the movie treats as an obvious metaphor for escapism, and basically they get jobs in the real world, and the movie totes this as some existential win for the characters. And maybe it is. Maybe it is an existential win for Steve and Garrett, who have spent most of their adulthood running away from their own responsibilities. Maybe this is a good lesson for the adults watching the film, maybe a win for them. But this is not a win for whom the movie is targeted.
Natalie: Are you sure you don't want to come back?
Steve: Yeah, I'm staying here. I got a bunch more stuff I want to build.
Natalie: Why don't you bring some of that magic to the real world?
(The humans enter the portal as Steve ponders about it. Finally, he makes a decision.)
Steve: Screw it. I’m coming with.
(Finally, he heads into the portal to return to the real world.)
Steve: (voiceover) Turns out, if you're brave enough, you can make the real world… your Overworld.
When a child goes to sit down in a movie theater to watch a funny movie about their favorite video game, they should not be force-fed some adult narrative about how escapism is terrible and how they should quickly start growing up. Children do not come into the theater thinking about the Game Over World foreclosure notice they just got in the mail. They do not, and should not, think about these things.
So, Mr. Jared Hess, if you’re reading this, I do not like your movie. In fact, I hate it. Stop fucking trying to make kids grow up. You are an asshole.
These are lessons children’s movies should not teach, as they are inappropriate for children. These lessons are things that cannot and should not be taught by corporate media. A child must find these things out for themselves, and when they do, their shadow will have caught up with them, and they will no longer be a child. At that point, they will be something else. And this is not something to celebrate. This is something to mourn.
Mr. Jared Hess, by subjecting children to your terrible movie, you are hastening the shadow of maturity, and this, I believe, is flat-out evil. So I can only hope that this was an accident, an oversight, rather than your true intent. Otherwise, you sir are a monster.
Stop trying to put kids in Game Over World. This is the domain of adults, not children.
As Jack Black would say, my son yearns for the mines. He’s 2.8 years old and loves A Minecraft Movie. He stands on top of our living-room coffee table shouting CHICKEN JOCKEY and singing the Lava Chicken song. And he asks to watch the movie every day.
And that’s fine. It entertains him, which is a hard thing to do considering he’s inherited all my worst attention-deficit qualities, meaning, for me, the movie is a brief respite from his normal hyperactive madness. But by extension, considering he watches the movie every day, I've watched A Minecraft Movie maybe six hundred times by now, or at least it’s felt that way, because, despite its fairly standard runtime, it’s an excruciatingly torturous experience that feels much longer than it actually is. This is especially true on rewatches, when you start to notice how the plot is totally contrived, how most of the characters exist for no real reason, and how the pacing resembles my son’s own hyperactive thought-process, which is probably why he likes the movie so much. For example, the first forty-five minutes of the film, before they even enter the Minecraft world, are set in the real world, introduce a bunch of characters that do not matter to the plot whatsoever, and play out like a poor recreation of Napoleon Dynamite, cutting from one weird scene to another very quickly, complete with forced-quirky humor that feels like it was focus-grouped in the early 2000s, with lines delivered by middle-aged women like, “You can bag me up and take me to the curb anytime, but you gotta bungee the lid 'cause I got a lot of raccoons in there,” which feels highly inappropriate considering this is a fucking kids’ movie.
I don’t really want to harp on all the problems with the movie because there are way too many to count, and because that’s not really the point of this journal entry, and also because A Minecraft Movie is a kids’ movie first and foremost, so who the fuck actually cares. But I feel it’s important to let you know that this same take-me-to-the-curb woman later becomes romantically involved with a Minecraft villager who has a huge nose and massive block head that look as if human flesh has been stretched way too tightly over them, and he communicates only in creepy, sometimes pained grunts. The whole thing amounts to total nightmare fuel. In fact, most of the CGI in this movie is total nightmare fuel, as all the denizens of the Minecraft world have fleshy, real-world texturing over their clearly video-game-like block bodies, sometimes with nasty little hairs poking out here and there, which makes for some seriously unsettling imagery that could have only come from the mind of one seriously disturbed individual, presumably Jared Hess, the director, who also directed, you guessed it, Napoleon Dynamite.
Of course, much like the first forty-five minutes of A Minecraft Movie and the weird interspecies-romance subplot, everything I’ve typed up so far is pretty much irrelevant to both the plot of the movie and the point I’m trying to make with this journal entry, which is that, despite being a video-game movie made for kids, it tries to shoehorn what I feel is a very anti-kids message, which is what I'm about to get into here. And this message disturbs me because it mirrors something that I think about and wrestle with literally every day. It is something that I think no child should be forced to think about, especially when they just tuned in to watch Jack Black do funny things in a world inspired by their favorite video game, Minecraft.
But before I can analyze the overall message of the film, which is actually very deliberate, not something the script accidentally stumbles into, I have to provide some background for two of the more important characters.
The first important character is, of course, Steve. Steve’s story is one of escapism. The movie opens with a montage of Steve throughout the years. He starts as a young child who, for whatever reason, yearns for the mines, observing them from afar, dreaming of the day when he can get into those caves and do some digging or whatever. But before long, real life kicks in, and suddenly Steve, now a grotesque fat man in his thirties, is a paper pusher at some corporate office, depressed and without purpose. “My name is Steve. And as a child, I yearned for the mines. But it didn't really work out. So, I did a terrible thing. I grew up.” Toward the end of the montage, Steve has a little epiphany, so he quits his job to follow his dream. From that point, he spends all his free time mining in a nearby quarry, eventually unearthing a glowing blue cube, the Earth Crystal, which opens a portal to the Overworld, i.e. the Minecraft world, where he spends the next several years mining, crafting, and building stuff, basically escaping his real-world responsibilities. In the Overworld, he makes a wolf friend named Dennis, and at some point, he discovers an underworld full of pig-like monsters commanded by Malgosha, an evil piglin sorceress. Things happen and Malgosha captures Steve, demanding that he give her the Earth Crystal so that she can take over the universe or whatever, but Steve refuses, sending Dennis off with the Earth Crystal to hide it in the real world beyond the portal. This leads into the start of the movie, where the whole Napoleon Dynamite rip-off kicks in.
The second important character is Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, played by that same guy who did Game of Thrones and Aquaman or whatever, Jason Momoa. Before the events of the film, he was a child video-game prodigy, having won many video game tournaments and corporate sponsorships, which set him up for financial success and inflated his ego to an absurd degree. However, by the start of the film, he’s squandered all his sponsorship money and is now a washed-up, overweight, mullet-wearing middle-aged man who owns a retro video game store aptly named “Game Over World.” Maybe you can see where this is going. His store is filled to the brim with old stuff from his youth: classic video game consoles, arcade cabinets, ancient CRTs, retro boomboxes, that sort of stuff. One gets the impression that Garrett is a nostalgia junkie obsessed with his childhood. He’s much like that one character from Napoleon Dynamite, the ex-football-player uncle who points at the far-off mountains and says, “How much you wanna bet I can throw a football over them mountains?” Both of these characters live in the past, refusing to move on from their glory days. In fact, all Garrett ever talks about is how he was once the greatest video-game player in the world, which is played for laughs, as Garrett does have some self-awareness about his situation, constantly trying to downplay his boasting by pretending that he doesn’t actually care: “Gamer of the Year, 1989. Whatever. I barely think about it.” Yet despite this, he’s started a mentorship program for people who want to “win at the game of life,” using his own life as a model, even though his own life is in shambles because he is stuck, unable to move on from his glory days. Now, his store is being foreclosed on, and his obnoxious arrogance has made him few friends. After a series of incredibly stupid events, he stumbles into the Minecraft world, where he quickly realizes that he can use Minecraft-world diamonds to make a profit and thus save his soon-to-be-foreclosed retro game store, Game Over World.
Watching this movie, as an adult man in his thirties, I am reminded of my own follies. This is what so disturbs me about the film. In Garrett, I see myself. In Steve, I see myself. This may sound ridiculous, considering this is a kids’ movie for kids, but it is true nevertheless. Like Garrett, my office is my Game Over World. I have games in here from my childhood, from the early 2000s, collecting dust on bookshelves and tables, like a shrine to my youth. In a drawer just to the left of me: jewel-case copies of all the PlayStation Final Fantasy games, Chrono Cross, Arc the Lad, and SaGa Frontier; original Xbox games in their cheap plastic cases, like Panzer Dragoon, Halo, Mega Man Anniversary, and Morrowind; even some old issues of Nintendo Power from the days when I wore a bowl cut. Even further left, on a wooden table that holds my Xbox 360 and Nintendo Switch, old 360 games stand upright between bookends: Fable, Skyrim, Orange Box, Blue Dragon, Oblivion, and more. Next to that, favorite DVDs I’ve had since I was a rebellious teenager: the whole Cowboy Bebop collection, Lost in Translation, the entire Boondocks series, the movie Collateral starring Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise, and so on, all stacked atop each other, their spines facing out, creating a border of nostalgia around the one thing that helps me escape reality: the television set.
Like Steve, I find myself inexplicably drawn to the television, becoming sucked into the pixely glow. I try to fight it, tell myself that gaming has run its course, that it doesn’t bring me the same pleasure it once did, that I could be doing anything else with my time, but night after night I still find myself sitting there, in front of the screen, burning my retinas with the colors of escapism. There is no moderation in my hobbies. I play till ungodly hours. I eschew other things I’d like to be doing, like reading and writing, to stare into this nostalgic glow. I have reached an age where the act of playing video games triggers thoughts of wasted time and irresponsibility, yet there I am, night after night, still doing it, still playing the games, surrounded by all the old things I love. I foster times and places redolent of those long past, not to remind me of them, but to hide within them. I do this every night, to forget, or perhaps to run away from, what I have become, what we all eventually become.
They say age is just a number, that you can be young forever, but at a certain age, the shadow of responsibility catches up with you, and before you know it, maturity has slain the child inside. Your thinking changes, becomes more pragmatic and wise, and while this is enlightening in some ways, it is also scary as hell. What am I to do with myself? Who am I to become? Am I contributing to society in a meaningful way? What is a “meaningful way,” actually? Why do I tell myself that it doesn’t matter when I know, deep down, that it does? The nihilistic excuses start slipping away, replaced by some vague feeling of expectations being missed, but these expectations are not the expectations of your parents, or your teachers, or your boss, but of someone else entirely: you. They are your own expectations, dormant for years, coming to greet you. And the greeting is most unwelcome.
In this way, it is not A Minecraft Movie that disturbs me, but this: my own maturity.
But herein lies my problem with A Minecraft Movie. It is not that the movie has poor pacing, or that the writing is frankly abysmal, or all the weird sexual innuendos, or even the fleshy block people, or how everything looks obviously green-screened. It is that the movie, which is targeted toward kids, tries hard to make the very kids watching it grow up.
By the end of the movie, as you might imagine, both Steve’s and Garrett’s shadow catches up with them, they mature, they end up renouncing their old escapist ways, abandoning the Minecraft world, which the movie treats as an obvious metaphor for escapism, and basically they get jobs in the real world, and the movie totes this as some existential win for the characters. And maybe it is. Maybe it is an existential win for Steve and Garrett, who have spent most of their adulthood running away from their own responsibilities. Maybe this is a good lesson for the adults watching the film, maybe a win for them. But this is not a win for whom the movie is targeted.
Natalie: Are you sure you don't want to come back?
Steve: Yeah, I'm staying here. I got a bunch more stuff I want to build.
Natalie: Why don't you bring some of that magic to the real world?
(The humans enter the portal as Steve ponders about it. Finally, he makes a decision.)
Steve: Screw it. I’m coming with.
(Finally, he heads into the portal to return to the real world.)
Steve: (voiceover) Turns out, if you're brave enough, you can make the real world… your Overworld.
When a child goes to sit down in a movie theater to watch a funny movie about their favorite video game, they should not be force-fed some adult narrative about how escapism is terrible and how they should quickly start growing up. Children do not come into the theater thinking about the Game Over World foreclosure notice they just got in the mail. They do not, and should not, think about these things.
So, Mr. Jared Hess, if you’re reading this, I do not like your movie. In fact, I hate it. Stop fucking trying to make kids grow up. You are an asshole.
These are lessons children’s movies should not teach, as they are inappropriate for children. These lessons are things that cannot and should not be taught by corporate media. A child must find these things out for themselves, and when they do, their shadow will have caught up with them, and they will no longer be a child. At that point, they will be something else. And this is not something to celebrate. This is something to mourn.
Mr. Jared Hess, by subjecting children to your terrible movie, you are hastening the shadow of maturity, and this, I believe, is flat-out evil. So I can only hope that this was an accident, an oversight, rather than your true intent. Otherwise, you sir are a monster.
Stop trying to put kids in Game Over World. This is the domain of adults, not children.
