Reading about the development process of “A Minecraft Movie” feels like reading the treatment for a season arc on “The Studio,” the new Apple TV+ series satirizing Hollywood, in which Seth Rogen plays a newly minted studio head tasked with shepherding a “Kool-Aid” movie from brand to screen. For 10 years, various writers and directors took a swing adapting the Swedish video game that enthralls children, who apparently yearn for the mines. The result? A movie that makes more sense as a punchline on “The Studio” than it does as a film itself.

Minecraft is an open-world “sandbox” game, where players mine, and then craft, plundering digitally rendered resources (iron, gold, diamonds) to turn them into furniture, tools and weapons — a wonderful lesson for the impressionable young people who will inherit our fragile Earth. They also build structures out of cubes of various matter, as far as I can tell (don’t yell at me, I don’t play video games). In the film, the message has been shifted into a celebration of “creativity,” which is a bit of a stretch.

“Napoleon Dynamite” director Jared Hess was the last filmmaker to catch the hot potato, working with a script credited to (deep breath) Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James and Chris Galletta (Allison Schroeder has a story by credit with Bowman and Palmer). Hess has imbued the film with his signature sense of suburban absurdity, which at first feels fun, anarchic and pleasurably silly, with his “Gentleman Broncos” co-stars Jemaine Clement and Jennifer Coolidge showing up to play outlandish side characters.

But then you start thinking about what it means for Hess to put his “auteur stamp” on a piece of IP like Minecraft, and that the studio behind the film, Warner Bros., has displayed such shockingly ruthless “anti-art” attitudes and business practices in the last couple of years, that it all starts too feel too contradictory and hypocritical to reconcile. Especially with that whole “celebration of creativity” message forced upon us.

Hess builds his own Minecraft world with his familiar deadpan humor, which at least gives it a sense of personality and point of view. The other two personality hires come in the form of Jack Black playing Steve, a man who has long been lost to the Overworld of Minecraft thanks to a mysterious crystal “orb” (it’s square), and Jason Momoa, as Garrett “The Garbageman” Garrison, a washed-up former champion arcade gamer, his backstory illustrated in a mockumentary that references the cult 2000s doc “The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.”

Black is an excellent performer, and remains one of our best, but he’s not an actor who “disappears” into a role. His schtick is charming, as he mugs and sings and cocks his brow, but it’s the same bit every time. Still, there remains no one better to emphatically deliver a long expository voice-over about the game and world before the opening credits roll.

Momoa, clad in feathered hair and ‘80s gear, makes for a fine partner to Black on this journey, which kicks off when Garrett and his new young pal Henry (Sebastian Hansen) get sucked through a portal into the Overworld, and are followed by Henry’s sister Natalie (Emma Myers) and their real estate agent Dawn (Danielle Brooks). They connect with Steve, who guides them on a journey to fight off zombies and collect little treasures and doodads in order to defeat Malgosha (Rachel House), an angry squared-off war pig queen who would like to turn everything into her dark, gold-mining underworld, the Nether.

Black and Momoa bring the energy and the hair metal tunes, and they are fun to watch. The sibling storyline is ho-hum basic, and the talented Danielle Brooks is also there, but not given anything interesting to do. For a wildly imaginative world-building project, the film is mostly ghastly to look at, all flat green-screen and blocky sets for the cast to scramble upon. There’s also the strange, silent, cubic villagers with long rectangular noses who are deeply unsettling, not to mention the square pigs. Furthermore, if the possibilities of this world are endless, why does it all devolve into violent, ugly, boring warfare?

It’s hard to place the responsibility for this on Hess. It’s not his fault, he’s just an independent filmmaker who made a few incredibly distinctive films, fighting to put his stamp on this unwieldy behemoth of a project. The blame for this off-putting and odd beast of a film lies in the corporate choices that brought us here: a worship of IP, four-quadrant chasing, and putting artists through the meat-grinder of development. The children may yearn for the mines, but it’s unlikely they’ll yearn for the weird mish-mash that is “A Minecraft Movie.”

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'A MINECRAFT MOVIE'

1.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG (for violence/action, language, suggestive/rude humor and some scary images)

Running time: 1:41

How to watch: In theaters April 4

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