For the first time this year, I’m overseas. Maybe for some people that would be a lot of travel, but for me, that’s relatively minimal flying.

I don’t mind flying, especially when there are things to watch. And given that I got to fly Singapore Air for a good chunk of my trip, there was as much choice as you could hope for.

Spoilers ahead for everything

A Minecraft Movie

Often my movie-watching on the plane gravitates toward things that aren’t going to be too emotionally or intellectually taxing.

Also, on my list of movie-watching goals for the year, I included A Minecraft Movie as one of the things I wanted to see just to determine if it was really as bad as it looked.

And so, given that the opportunity to watch the video-game adaptation arose on my recent flight, where I wouldn’t have to pay anything more than I already was, and was pretty limited in what I could do with my time, I watched it.

It is, of course, bad. Or at least, it’s not for me. There might be some who enjoy the juvenile silliness of seeing the world of Minecraft brought to life, or more accurately to having live-action actors composited into a Minecraft world, but I am not one of them. My knowledge of actual Minecraft lore is pretty limited so I can’t even comment as to whether the film actually evokes something tangible about the Minecraft experience. But in some ways that doesn’t really matter, at least not to me. I mean, I don’t like the recent Superman just because it “felt like” what I think Superman is supposed to feel like; I like it because I like the characters and story–things I didn’t enjoy with The Minecraft Movie.

The story starts with Steve (a generic Minecraft character, I gather) played by Jack Black, narrating his backstory of finding his way into the cube-based Minecraft word, but falling afoul of its dark other half and the tyrannical “piglin” Queen Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House). He manages to send to the real world the artefacts needed to make the journey (so Malgosha can’t take over everything) and they’r found by Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Momoa) and handful of ordinary people who are there presumably to keep things grounded. Everyone runs around in a series of Minecraft-inspired locations and action set pieces until there’s a big final fight, the end.

Oh, and along the way in an almost entirely separate subplot, a disturbing looking “villager” character escapes accidentally into the real world, meets a recently divorced school principal played by Jennifer Coolidge, who can’t tell that thing isn’t human, and they fall in love.

I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like this movie, but I was also pretty sure I wasn’t going to like The Lego Movie and I thought that thing was great, so I’m always willing to be wrong. And of course the film is coming off the heels of Barbie, which whether you like it or not elevated the whole idea of movies based on things kids play with to another level. But A Minecraft Movie isn’t a repeat of either of those experiences. There’s nothing meaningful going on in the story or the characters, beyond the most thinly presented ideas: Malgosha wants to crush all creativity because she was laughed at during a dance competition as a kid, the older sister needs to accept the younger brother’s creative gifts, Garrett needs to learn not to be such a jerk, that sort of thing.

And the movie is not particularly funny. Jack Black is intrinsically enjoyable to watch but he doesn’t have anything to do here beyond just be manic. And while it sort of surprised me to see Jason Momoa be so self-deprecating in his part, it’ss not enough to make him actually interesting to watch.

So yeah, consistent with all expectations, I don’t recommend A Minecraft Movie, but you know, if you saw the trailer and you think you might be the audience for that thing, by all means go for your life.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

Also on my viewing list for the year is this 2024 expansion to the Lord of the Rings cinematic universe, an anime film set a couple of hundred years before Bilbo Baggins, about the fall of one dynasty of kings and the rise of another in the kingdom of Rohan, a location that gets a lot of play in the original Lord of the Rings story. It’s a big war film with lots of drama and treachery and heroics and monsters, that has all the makings of an epic fantasy-adventure akin to the Lord of the Rings that we all know (and many of us) love, all done in a beautiful anime style.

However, it struggles to remain interesting, which is obviously a critical sort of problem for a movie to have. It’s not bad in the way that I’d argue The Hobbit movies often were, but it’s ponderous and slower than I want, and thus is occasionally dull. It runs about 2 1/4 hours, which is not a crazy amount of time, but I think it could probably have shaved off 15 minutes or so and been stronger as a result.

It also gets off to a clunky start, as the script has to work hard to introduce all of its players in meaningful ways. More than once in the movie’s first few minutes, characters just shows up and say hello to Héra (Rohan’s princess and our primary protagonist) so that some expository dialogue can let us know who they are. It’s a clunky way of letting us know who Héra’s brothers, father, cousin, bodyguard and aunt are, so that the story can get underway.

The War of the Rohirrim features connections to the broader Lord of the Rings story that I guess are okay, but don’t really add anything to this actual movie. We learn how Helm’s Deep got it’s name, which is fine, but we also get a little scene inserted in where see a couple of orcs who have been instructed by their master to go and collect rings from dead people, there is a reference to Gandalf and his interest in those orcs at the end, and Saruman fully shows up at the end taking over Isengard (where he hung out in the original story, and whose leader has met a sorry end in this one)–he is actually voiced by Christopher Lee himself thanks to some archival recording. If you are watching this movie looking for direct call-backs to the Lord of the Rings, maybe you’ll like all this, but I’d have rather it focused on just telling its story with excellence.

The Amateur

The best movie I watched on this trip from Australia was The Amateur. Rami Malek plays CIA cryptographer Charlie Heller whose wife is tragically killed during a terrorist attack while overseas on a business trip. He uses his considerable technical skills to identify who the attackers were, but when his bosses refuse to take action because of their particular security agenda, he blackmails them into training him to be a field agent so he can go and kill them himself.

It’s an outrageous premise that works because of the strength of Malek’s performance, and because of the tightness of the storytelling and editing. While that Charlie is training, his bosses are trying to figure out whether his blackmail threats (to expose illegal missions that his main boss has authorised) actually carry any weight. It turns out they don’t, but Charlie has left such a confusing trail for them to follow than by the time they are sure, he has already learned what he needs to and is on his way to fulfil his mission. The question that hangs over him the whole time is whether he can actually do it–can he actually bring himself to full on murder the people who murdered his wife?

The answer turns out to be yes. He’s a bad shot, but he knows how to rig a rooftop swimming pool to shatter at just the right moment, for instance. And so the movie plays out with Charlie tracking down his enemies (going through them, video-game style to get to the big boss) while various people from his own agency set out to kill him as a traitor. More than once, you can’t imagine how he is going to survive, and yet he is constantly able to use his wits and intellect to stay one step ahead of his enemies. It’s ridiculous, yet gripping and even compelling.

The movie’s cast also includes Laurence Fishburne as Charlie’s trainer and then would-be assassin, Julianne Nicholson (who made a compelling villain in Paradise earlier this year) as Charlie’s not-evil boss, and Jon Bernthal (who plays the Punisher on Daredevil and, I assume, The Punisher, and the dead brother in The Bear) as a CIA agent who ends up having less to do with the plot than I thought. And also, Lois Lane / Mrs. Maisel herself, Rachel Brosnahan, shows up as Charlie’s doomed wife. I’m reminded of how good and actress she is by this–it’s not a very meaty party, but she plays it with real believability and charm. This is of course critical to the movie as it helps to make everything Charlie he does plausible.

Anyway, that was my trip here. In a couple of days I fly home. What will I watch then?