It is impossible to watch A Minecraft Movie without thinking of the poet Rupi Kaur.

In 2014, the then-22-year-old Kaur rose to internet infamy after self-publishing milk and honey, her debut collection of poetry. Predominantly comprising short poems and illustrations that originally appeared on Kaur’s Instagram page, milk and honey has over the past decade sold more than 11 million copies, been translated into over 40 languages, and bestowed upon Kaur a crossover popularity that transcends the usual subcultural constraints of online micro-influencing and literary notoriety. In the process, Kaur has attained a status that feels incompatible with being a writer and plain inconceivable in terms of being a poet: She has become a genuine celebrity.

Today, Kaur boasts more than 4.3 million Instagram followers, which situates her between Marie Kondo and Chunkz in terms of audience size, right in the sweet spot where social media attention translates to real-world name recognition and revenue streams. The New Republic named Kaur the “Writer of the Decade” in 2019, and three years later, she embarked on a 50-city Metallica-style world tour that saw her reading to sold out theaters across North America, Europe, South America, Oceania, and Asia. It’s likely that no other living person has introduced more young readers to the edifying pleasures of poetry than Rupi Kaur, and that objectively impressive accomplishment would be a cause for celebration if she also didn’t write the shallowest, laziest, dumbest, sub-doggerel dogshit poetry ever glimpsed by human eyes. (Arguably.)

The culture industry stakes of Rupi Kaur’s work overlap usefully with those of A Minecraft Movie, Jared Hess’s shallow, lazy, and pridefully stupid blockbuster based on the best-selling video game of all time. Like Kaur, Minecraft’s ascendence looks in retrospect like a pure period-specific product of the 2010s, when social media started appreciably supplanting preexisting institutional gatekeepers in commercial spaces like publishing and video games. Before its official release in 2011, Minecraft was a self-published project as well; its Swedish creator, Markus Persson, peddled alpha builds of the game direct to players until he earned enough to quit his day job and focus on development full-time. By 2014, Persson was selling Minecraft to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, and since then, the multinational software corporation has raked in over $4 billion from game sales alone.

Coughing up all this money for Instapoetry and Minecoins are two rabidly devoted international fandoms consisting primarily of young people—majority boys over here for Minecraft, majority girls over here for Rupi—though Kaur and A Minecraft Movie both owe a debt of gratitude to the free publicity generated by older, more skeptical readers and moviegoers. For these critics, Kaur and A Minecraft Movie are worth obsessing over but only pessimistically, because their widespread popularity among the youth is inversely proportional to how much they appear to absolutely, positively suck.

Indeed, the less effort and thought that Rupi Kaur puts into a poem, the more it seems that she is rewarded not just by the market but by the universe, all while countless actually talented poets toil in obscurity, penury, and the slush piles of unreadable literary magazines. These 1% v 99% inequalities are little different when you compare the performance of A Minecraft Movie and its smarter, qualitatively superior box office competitors—you know, like Dog Man and The Chosen: Last Supper: Part 3. In conjunction, you can understand why concerned parties might view Rupi Kaur and A Minecraft Movie as ominous points-of-no-return in American culture’s accelerating, irreversible descent into mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging mass brainlessness.

A Minecraft Movie will do nothing to dissuade these doomsayers. Most sentient beings over the age of 16 will agree that the film signals a coming apocalypse, that Idiocracy didn’t go far enough, that the United States needs to institute a strict eugenicist policy to breed the Low IQs out of our gene pools lest they turn to sludge pits. The plot is at once barely sketched and overstuffed: Jack Black, so on auto-pilot he couldn’t be bothered to shave his beard, stars as Steve, a floundering doorknob salesman who gets sucked into the pixelated worlds of Minecraft. Steve, after discovering he is a natural builder, is then entrapped in the hellish molten mines of Nether World by Malgosha, the evil queen of the piglins who broke bad after flubbing her audition on Nether’s Got Talent.

Steve’s dog Dennis escapes with a Maguffin called the Orb of Dominance, however, and a slipshod series of events leads to Steve sort of being rescued by a former 80s competitive arcade gamer (Jason Mamoa), a pair of orphaned siblings who specialize in digital marketing and jetpack manufacturing (Emma Meyers, Sebastian Hansen), and a realtor who moonlights as a petting zoo entrepreneur (Danielle Brookes). You don’t have to watch the opening credits to intuit that the movie has five credited screenwriters, or to guess that the highest-ranking piglin warrior in Malgosha’s army is named General Chungus. …Feel the throbbing in your brain yet? That’s the tumor growing.

The message of A Minecraft Movie is basically the same seductive, fallacious one undergirding the tariffs that President Drumpf recently placed on the island system solely inhabited by penguins: America used to be a place where people built things, a place where optimism and creativity were the coins of the realm, and this country won’t be great again until the sissified American workforce smashes their laptops and embraces the opportunity to contract measles on a phone case assembly line. Here, every day can be Liberation Day.

Even the divisions between Minecraft’s Over and Nether Worlds reflect the binary choice offered to workers in a post-industrial economy. “The Nether” is a financialized wasteland filled with miserable pigs mining for gold (investors, consultants, film studio executives), while the Over World is a false utopia for the creative classes (graphic designers, podcast hosts, Substackers who produce nothing of value because they spend most of their time evading zombies and Doordashing fast-casual lava chicken takeout).

It’s notable, then, that when the ragtag team of gamers, orphans, and realtors convinces the emancipated Steve to leave the infinite possibilities of Over World and return to reality to “build things” with them, almost nothing material or useful gets built. The realtor starts concentrating all her energies on her traveling petting zoo, the girl orphan becomes a self-defense teacher, and the boy orphan modifies his jetpack design into a version that will maim or kill—generous estimate—half of its users.

Steve and Jason Mamoa’s gamer character, Garrett, now co-own a retro video game store, a monetized museum/nostalgia shrine dedicated to the innovation and healthy competition that just don’t happen anymore. And this is after the characters learn about the unassailable importance of building things. How many Minecraft sequels will it take before one of the characters is a bricklayer or a contractor? How can someone look at the written-in-neon name of Garrett and Steve’s store, GAME OVER WORLD, and resist the dark urge to think that our culture has run out of extra lives?

With all that said, A Minecraft Movie may just be presenting the gross idiocy of the entertainment industry with a different gloss. For instance, it feels insulting for the filmmakers not to introduce and contextualize one of the references in the movie (see: Chicken Jockey), but compare that contempt-for-your-audience to the nonexistent context provided to viewers by Pablo Lorrain’s celebrated “20th Century Women” trilogy. If you watched Jackie, Spencer, and Maria without knowing anything about Jackie Kennedy, Princess Diana, or Maria Callas, you wouldn’t just have no idea what was going on—you would think you had gone insane. Perhaps what passes for “intelligence” and “maturity” for the cultural consumers who describe Minecraft as “brainrot” is stupidity and immaturity in forms that cloak them more effectively.

Not buying it? Ask yourself whether the average Rupi Kaur poem is demonstrably worse than this poem that was published by The Paris Review, or if the self-aware silliness of A Minecraft Movie is more corrosive or dangerous than the poorly disguised stupidity on display during the second half of The Brutalist. In a culture where unapologetic hacks are considered serious artists and uninformed blowhards are considered public intellectuals, you can’t blame anybody, young or old, idiot or genius, for wanting General Chungus to smash their cabeza between his butt cheeks like a walnut. The game was over decades before milk and honey was published, before Minecraft was released, before Rupi Kaur and Markus Persson were even born. Our reality makes a lightless netherworld ruled by monstrous pigs look, in comparison, like the grand utopian dream of Megalopolis. And yet here we are living, despite it all.

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Numerical Score for Numbskulls

1.25 Lava Chickens out of 5 🍗