A Minecraft Movie, Test: Reviews This Week

A Minecraft Movie: Where Endless Imagination Goes To Die

A Minecraft Movie is rigged against the self-driven wonders and charms of the game it adapts. It exists in a post-Pixels, post-Lego-Movie and post-Mario Bros. universe, it’s nothing the kids haven’t seen before in terms of ‘inventiveness’. Rahul Desai reviews.

Dir: Jared Hess

Cast: Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Sebastian Hansen, Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks

Playing in: Theatres

IN THE FIRST EPISODE OF The Studio — Apple TV’s terrific comic satire about a Hollywood studio head struggling to balance his inherent cinephilia with shallow IP-driven productions — a “Kool-Aid Man” movie needs to be green-lit. He wants to green-light a Scorsese movie instead, but can’t avoid the inevitability of a flimsy branded franchise in a post- Barbie landscape. That’s what A Minecraft Movie is. It’s a numbers-driven adaptation of the all-time best-selling Swedish video-game that, ironically, is all about pure creation and imagination. For a film that’s based on the limitless concept of building things and crafting entire 3D terrains out of thin air, A Minecraft Movie is painfully generic fan service that relies on nothing but familiarity, nostalgia, the same old Jack Black shenanigans and a surprisingly funny Jason Momoa. And the 3D is bad, too.

I’ve always wondered why video-games — often considered the purest form of post-modern storytelling — are adapted into big-screen popcorn flicks by studios. Sure, these movies are easy children’s money, but the point of games is that they offer you a chance to control the story. Movies based on those games take that control away. Transforming interactive player experiences into viewer experiences feels like a step down; it reduces the act of escaping into the illusion of escaping. Rant done, I feel lighter now.

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Test: An Entertaining Drama That Tapers Off By The End

Test is a film that is happy to deliver a lot of drama with some cricket thrown in as novelty, writes Aditya Shrikrishna .

Dir: S Sashikanth

Cast: R Madhavan, Nayanthara, Siddharth, Meera Jasmine

Streaming on: Netflix

IT’S BEEN OVER TWO DECADES SINCE Aayutha Ezhuthu and we once again have Madhavan and Siddharth locked in an intense struggle right in the heart of Chennai. Not far from each other either. If it was Napier Bridge in the 2004 Mani Ratnam film, it is a stone’s throw away at Chepauk in S Sashikanth’s directorial debut Test (a Netflix release). If it was political and ideological in the earlier film, it is emotional and personal in this one. Siddharth is Arjun here as well — not a confused young man eyeing the American dream but a patriot wearing India’s Test cricket whites, a star batsman, the kind whose class is evident even if he is on his last legs. Twenty years on, a star cricketer from Tamil Nadu playing for India isn’t as implausible. But India playing Pakistan at home in test cricket? That stuff can happen only in fiction in 2025. And Madhavan here is Saravanan, a washed-up tragic scientist, an eternal striver as deep in insecurities as he is in debt.

Written by Suman Kumar, Test begins in earnest and ups the dramatic scale quickly and economically. There isn’t much exposition; we get the interpersonal relationships purely by the stakes and conflict introductions. Saravanan is working on hydro fuel and is looking to win a grant to change his fate and that of the country’s pollution problem. His wife Kumudha (Nayanthara), a teacher, juggles a childhood connection with Arjun and just happens to teach Arjun and Padma’s (Meera Jasmine) son Adi at school. And Arjun is looking to keep his place in the Indian cricket team as a high voltage series against Pakistan hangs in balance at MA Chidambaram Stadium in Chepauk. Sashikanth’s debut is impressive for its sustained pace and the cricket portions, the realest they have looked in a long time in Indian cinema, almost like watching live action on television.

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