It would frankly be silly at this point not to get Jack Black to release his vocal chords if he’s starring in a movie. Following the viral success of ‘Peaches,’ Black’s gloriously silly ditty sung as Bowser in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, it looks like A Minecraft Movie is trying to capture some of the same magic. Will it though?
Well, OK, probably not. Where ‘Peaches’ was inherently funny, the overwrought rendition of asinine lyrics, sung in the plaintiff voice of a lovelorn Bowser, Minecraft’s ‘I Feel Alive’—despite being fine--feels overwritten and, well, smells a touch of desperation. But, and it’s an important but, only in the context of the cynical exercise we can see being deployed. The song itself is competent, extremely well-performed, and could easily have been a Whitesnake B-side in the mid-80s.
See, the joke is, “rock” means both rock music AND a thing you use in Minecraft! GEDDIT? Beyond that, it’s very much an ‘80s movie credits fare, the plot of the film sung to family-friendly rock riffs, and it seems inevitable that it’ll play over the credits when A Minecraft Movie releases April 4.
And yet, at the same time, you can totally see an enthusiastic crowd jumping up and down as they roar out the catchy chorus. Children everywhere will find the album on Spotify after they’ve seen the film and enjoy air guitar rocking out during the bridge. It’ll do its job. And, in this sense, it’s rather emblematic of the movie as a whole.
Now, I was in no sense at all expecting to generate any controversy when I pointed out, in September last year, that the movie wasn’t trying to win over an audience of 20 and 30-somethings who played Minecraft in their youths. Yet, gosh, people were rather cross. Apparently every game-related film ever made should cater exactly to each specifically entitled manbaby who might see its trailer, and any other notion is blasphemy. The greatest heresy is to point out this is a film aimed at the current generation of children who are currently propelling Minecraft to being one of the biggest toy and gaming franchises in the world. This is largely because each entitled manbaby has an imaginary 12-year-old nephew who thinks the trailers look terrible.
Anyway, the point is, A Minecraft Movie is being met with a lot of bad faith, and it’s going to be very interesting to see how it performs heading into this storm. Obviously no one has any idea if it’s any good at this point, although it was reported that test screenings went well, and indeed that the movie didn’t match the tone of that first trailer. If it’s genuinely bad, rather than that tedious movie critic faux-weariness that is so often deployed for kids’ films, then it could obviously hurt the juggernaut’s progress.
My 10-year-old is absolutely hyped for this, each following trailer deliberately spotlighting Minecraft memes that are currently huge on YouTube, of which you and I are completely unaware. Which again is to say, I have a strong feeling that the creators know what they’re doing here, making a movie that’s not for those of us who were passing code for the Java edition to friends in 2009, but rather the kid on the bus today wearing aMinecraft school bag over their Minecraft joggers and hoodie, watching Skeppy on their phone.
And yeah, that’s inherently cynical. Much like the accompanying song. Then again, anyone holding out hope that this was ever going to be a Jim Jarmusch-like moody indie sleeper-hit was perhaps being a little naive. Anyway, here’s the far more excellent ‘Peaches.’
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