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This has to be the first film where watching it from behind a full row of eight-year-olds elevates the experience immensely; the surround-sound effect of a whole theater mimicking the villager “hrrngh” whenever one shows up on screen is truly priceless. Of course, this is “A Minecraft Movie.”

If “A Minecraft Movie” is anything, it’s weird. The first 10 minutes are half trailer, half fever dream, with Jack Black as Steve pranking the audience by cosplaying as the main character. Viewers then meet Garrett — played by Jason Momoa — who is somehow also not the true protagonist. Finally, viewers meet a pair of siblings, who are the true protagonists and who also have a dead mom thrown in for some cheap emotional value.

The audience doesn’t learn very much about these characters; Garrett is a disgraced gamer, Henry (Sebastian Hansen) is overly creative, his sister Natalie (Emma Myers) is overly protective, and Steve…likes mining? That’s about as far as it gets.

That’s not immediately a problem, however — the first third of the film feels self aware enough to where it is almost satirical; Jack Black’s constant narration is funny enough that it works. As the film goes on, though, this feeling is lost, replaced with a genuine sense of immature naivete.

The cinematography is pretty poor throughout, with amateurish green screen scenes that often break immersion. Even the most basic decision to make the movie live-action was a strange one. The world came out looking a bit like it is made of cloth, and there are strange implications for the visuals of a lot of the mobs — especially villagers, who achieve full uncanny valley status in the film, although to a mildly funny extent.

The film’s biggest disappointment, though, is structural rather than aesthetic. As a comparison, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of 2014’s “The Lego Movie” explained in an interview with Rotten Tomatoes that they wanted absolutely everything in their film to be made out of Lego bricks — meaning concrete things like characters and houses, but also more abstract visuals like ocean waves and explosions. In “The Lego Movie,” every character only moves like real Legos, and all of this was part of the key to its success. It felt real because it felt contained.

Compare that with “A Minecraft Movie,” where Henry’s main weapon is a tater tot gun — something that doesn’t even exist in the game.

There are many more examples of this — absurd combinations of impossibly rare spider jockeys, Jack Black only having one ender pearl despite having two incredibly rare elytra, and even half the makeup of the evil piglin army being mobs that don’t exist. The creepers are dysfunctional, exploding Garrett for a joke but somehow ignoring all the characters when surrounding them in a cave. So much of the sanctity of the game is sacrificed — at best to move the plot forward, at worst for a cheap gag.

That’s not to say that the movie isn’t funny. Jack Black’s charisma pushes the movie forward when a weak plot can’t, and Jennifer Coolidge shines as Vice Principal Marlene, with her hilarious side plot romance with an escaped villager standing as a highlight of the film. All her lines were cleverly written, and her divorceé backstory exemplifies the occasional subversions of children’s film expectations in a great way.

The plot is predictable but not terrible — a classic MacGuffin chase for a mysterious orb — and would have worked better if the main characters had any depth at all. It is extra disappointing given that Minecraft itself already has a captivating narrative. Setting up the good versus evil fight as a piglin army taking over an Overworld that the audience doesn’t care about is rocky at best, and there is no hint at a possible real world invasion, which could have raised the stakes.

Overall, the sad conclusion isn’t even that the movie itself didn’t impress, which it certainly didn’t. Instead, it’s that it squanders an enormous amount of potential in so many ways. Kids will laugh at some parts and enjoy the hero story, but for a film with the possibility of being an instant nostalgia-inducing classic, “A Minecraft Movie” truly falls flat.

—Staff writer Alessandro M. M. Drake can be reached at alessandro.drake@thecrimson.com.