A Minecraft Movie (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
… Chicken Jockey?
In an era when the cultural translation of video games into cinema remains a stumbling medium—half uncanny, half cringe—there’s been one savior to the pixel-to-picture pipeline: Jack Black. Having already lent his hyper-operatic vocals to The Super Mario Bros. Movie (and emerged as its improbable MVP), Black returns once again to steal scenes and stick in your head with A Minecraft Movie (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack). The man is a national treasure whose every note lands somewhere between unhinged genius and Saturday morning cartoon messiah. And in this soundtrack, once again, he carries.
Black’s original songs are easily the highest high this uneven but occasionally inspired compilation has to offer. His voice, equal parts Dio and Dr. Seuss, feels uncannily well-suited to the aesthetic of Minecraft: modular, imaginative, and unafraid of silliness. Whether he’s singing about redstone contraptions or the loneliness of block-based survival, Black strikes a rare chord—songs that feel simultaneously meme-ready and melodically bulletproof. There’s a sense that even if the film were reduced to lava and creeper dust, his tracks would still echo through the ruins, catchy as ever, humming through the circuits of a billion kid-streamed YouTube montages.
Elsewhere, the album assembles a modest but thematically cohesive mix of songs and score. Mark Mothersbaugh, former Devo deconstructor turned elder statesman of family-friendly film scores, contributes original instrumental tracks that pay quiet homage to Daniel Rosenfeld’s (C418’s) original Minecraft soundtrack—those floating, ambient motifs that once defined hours of block-breaking solitude. Mothersbaugh doesn’t try to outdo the game’s minimalism but instead reshapes it into something more cinematic without betraying its origins. It’s a careful needle-thread that works surprisingly well.
Not every track hits, of course. BENEE’s “Zero to Hero” offers all the ambition of a major pop moment, but lands somewhere between Fisher-Price and Spotify algorithm sludge. The beat is buoyant, the lyrics earnest, and the hook... well, there’s a hook. But it’s the kind of empty-calorie uplift that makes Sky Ferreira’s slow-burn melancholy sound like Mahler in comparison. It doesn’t offend, but it does feel like a pastel-colored spreadsheet entry: bright, chirpy, and utterly forgettable.
On the more defensible end of the filler spectrum is “Change Song,” a competent mid-tempo number that won’t haunt your dreams, but won’t make you pray for early-onset tinnitus either. It’s the kind of track that will comfort and lightly inspire a nine-year-old while they eat Cheez-Its and build a pixelated house shaped like a toilet. And maybe that’s enough.
But then, as if summoned by the darkest biome of the mid-’90s, comes Dirty Honey’s “When I’m Gone.” Let us be clear: this song is not original to the film, and its inclusion here feels like a corporate fever dream at best and sync budget necromancy at worst. The track is a sluggish Frankenstein’s monster sewn together from the least interesting strands of Appetite for Destruction—a song so generic it practically evaporates upon contact with human memory. It doesn’t “rock” so much as it creaks, like an old stage prop being pushed out for one last shuffle.
Dirty Honey is, generously, the AI-generated idea of what “real rock” should sound like to people who only listen to FM radio when their Bluetooth disconnects. “When I’m Gone” isn’t just phoned-in—it’s robocalled. It’s what happens when a record label says, “We want something like Guns N’ Roses,” but can’t afford Slash’s hat, let alone his actual playing. The lyrics smirk without charm. The riffs sound like they were grown in a test tube made of expired Monster Energy. That this song was included in the soundtrack is almost certainly because its sync fee cost roughly as much as a Diet Coke at a premiere party. It’s the budget-brand spackle in an otherwise thoughtfully built structure. A xerox of a xerox of a genre that’s already collapsed under the weight of its own hair spray.
Despite its low points, the soundtrack overall makes an admirable effort to speak to Minecraft’s cross-generational reach—offering enough sparkle for the kids, enough nods for the nostalgic adults, and Jack Black for everyone who still believes in the possibility of a perfect pop-culture crossover. Even if the album failed to chart on Spotify’s Weekly Top 200 or crack the Billboard 200 (a likely casualty of its chimeric composition), the film’s astonishing $550 million global box office shows there’s clearly a world of players… er, viewers who are hungry for this kind of joyful absurdity.
This isn’t a perfect album, but it’s a functional and sometimes inspired companion piece to a blockbuster that turned digital bricks into gold. Just skip Dirty Honey’s track unless you’re actively trying to speedrun the heat death of rock and roll.
