Survival Mode

Meditations on The Minecraft Movie in derelict Ireland

I almost saw all of The Minecraft Movie. Almost. I’ll explain.

I was in the Reel Cinema, Blackpool, curious as to if the film was quite as bad as some online critics had claimed. (TLDR: it wasn’t that bad at all). This cinema is usually quiet and is always clean. The staff are all dead-sound, because Blackpool is in the Northside, bai. The Northside is the side that’s closer to God, but we don’t look up at or down upon anyone, we look over at ye.

Anyway, earlier that day I walked past some of my favourite graffiti, several pieces sprayed on the derelict properties of Knapp’s Square. I noticed that the figure had been updated, raising the total number of human beings without a home in Ireland to 15’378. Had it been updated recently, or had I just not noticed? It’s like being a lobster in a pot with the temperature slowly rising. I had no answer. I usually cycle through this lane.

Later on, I was trying to remember something Blindboy said on his podcast along the lines of a “perpetual state of infantilisation”, as I watched grown adults and children alike pouring from McDonalds with Minecraft themed brown paper bags, toys and collectible figurines of the Hamburglar. (An Uncle O’ Grimacey figure in a balaclava might have sold me on this, I’ll admit). I’d seen people online burning them and cutting them open like plastic effigies and sacrifices. (What the actual fuck will future archaeologists think we were doing?). The theatre was chocked with giddy kids eager to shout their favourite memes over their tired mothers. Myself and my partner found these displays quite funny.

The film itself was at least partially respectful to its heritage, unlike the Five Nights at Freddy’s fiasco of 2023. There were clever visual gags and some darker skits sprinkled throughout, plus a hearty dose of Jack Black.

The words “chicken-jockey!” struck like a dozen pre-pubescent gongs in my dozing ears. They weren’t new words to me, or you. No. I’d seen the fucking memes. I’d been subjected to Ray D’Arcy saying those very words live on air. Oh, but the silos were readied and the missiles were to be fucking launched prompto! Popcorn boxes plunged through the darkness of the Reel Cinema. They collided with skinfades and scattered popcorn across the rows. I witnessed greasy carnage on an unprecedented scale. Only the Israeli “Defence” Forces could compete with them in their accuracy of strikes targeting children. It was seeing the smiles and hearing the laugher of children, after all, which had made me think of the ongoing Palestinian genocide.

Look, I wasn’t riveted by the film. I’m not the “target audience”. For it to be anything except nostalgia-bait was impressive in our current period of pop cultural glaciation. I was pleasantly surprised by this film; having had my expectations so fucking low, I was glad to be wrong. Let’s not dress things up, though. This whole project was a shameless cash grab, akin to almost every IP which gets adapted. Easy fucking money.

My distant dwelling 13th/8/2019, Survival Mode.

I won’t be having another two-week phase of playing Minecraft, however overdue. (Yes, even though it is still the best-selling game in history as of today). I remembered worlds I’d left in my wake. Worlds I’d treated ethically. Worlds I hadn’t. Had I been fair to the life of those places, or ever in this world? I couldn’t fully recount the plot of the film for you because I got so distracted by imagining a “faceless pile of cash” purchasing the 53 acres of fields in Rathcooney, which have recently gone up for sale. The same kind of blanket bomb cash that creates films like The Minecraft Movie, The Mario Movie, the Five Night’s at Freddy’s movie and potentially, on occassion, Jericho missiles.

I picture Banduff’s estate filled with flat pack housing estates, rented back for extortionate amounts to those rare Irish millennials who don’t end up emigrating. I picture the houses rise and watch some of them get boarded up, some go derelict, most get priced out by vulture funds from the very beginning. I’d seen this pattern repeat itself in every generation before mine, and was watching it begin to happen to mine. Slowly. One field, one flight, one life at a time.

Banduff house burned down during the summer of 2023. This was a huge loss to the Rathcooney area. Jake, you’re asking, what the fuck has this got to do with The Minecraft Movie? Fuck all, truth be told. These are really just some of the thoughts I had during the film.

The Banduff estate, like the Glen Valley Park, is a biodiversity hotspot, consisting of a vast range of habitats which merge at various points with the Greater Rathcooney and Upper Glanmire countryside. Particularly notable are the array of insects which fill the area yearly, from shield bugs to Bombini.

A plethora of fungi grow there too, including Psilocybe semilanceata. I imagined the destruction of native biodiversity which would ensue from the construction of another estate. No green shield bugs, no tortoiseshell butterflies, no moths, no rabbits, no foxes, no shrews, no mice, no rats, no woodpigeons, no pheasants. No gulls seeking shelter inland in land, and definitely no beetles riding the hole off one another (see the gallery below).

I left my Pagoda unoccupied (in Minecraft) for six years, because it occupies a size of space smaller than an SD card. And besides, it’s not “real”, it won’t fall into disrepair due to my absenteeism. The same cannot be said for the fringes of Cork’s Northside. Boarded windows speckle council estates and rural lanes like bruised eyes in the skulls of the houses. According to the Irish Examiner “There are more than 100,000 vacant and derelict residential properties in Ireland.”

Native Biodiversity of Rathcooney, June 2024.

As I wrote this piece, fireworks were going off in my neighbourhood. Zeus, our collie-husky mix, scampered up the stairs and into my lap. He’s scared of the rain, of planes, but especially of fireworks. He sincerely believes he is a teacup variety of husky. I understand how he feels, faced with threats that I cannot fully understand.

It was not with a clear mind that I entered the theatre, but I did manage to leave it with one, after treading the same mires you now have. The Minecraft Movie had the same effect on me that a cheap mint would after dinner. Thanks to the boundless energy of children, I got a relatively cheap laugh from this pop culture slop. Laughter is money well spent, in my opinion. It’s hard to laugh in the times we are facing. Laughter doesn’t knock on your door and evict you from your land. How many more children will die in the name of “defence”?