Meanwhile in Scunthorpe: The Hand Grenade and the Hi-Vis — and How Minecraft Might Stop Economists Falling Into Despair
Last week, I went to see A Minecraft Movie.
As a fan of film — and of Minecraft — I didn’t like it. For many reasons.
As a bit of a Minecraft purist, my first issue was how quickly it tried to replicate the feeling of playing the game. The film crammed into an hour and forty minutes what some people spend years doing — and still discover new things every time they log on.
But even then, I felt it missed the point entirely. It stripped away what makes Minecraft compelling: that slow, meandering sense of discovery; that total immersion; the experience of getting so absorbed — often with friends, or in my case, usually my children — that you lose all track of time and space among the endless unfolding of possibility.
By the end of that Friday, what annoyed me most was how badly I felt the film misunderstood Minecraft’s appeal. Anyone who enjoyed it, I told to read The Island by Max Brooks instead — a book that captures the essence of the game perfectly; the strange alienation of first entering the cube world, and the long, obsessive process of shaping it into your own sanctuary. Over countless hours. Hours you probably should’ve spent eating. Or sleeping. Or working.
But then Monday came. Work began, and I remembered why I’d gone to see A Minecraft Movie in the first place.
The previous Friday morning, I saw the front page of the Financial Times. It was a gloomy and nightmarish collage of plunging global share prices.
“This is quite bad,” I thought. “I’m going to the pictures.”
And by the end of the day, the only thing more aggravating than the impending collapse of the global economy was just how bad the film was.
By Monday, however, it struck me - maybe that was the point. I’d become so irrationally angry at A Minecraft Movie that I’d lost all sense of time and space, which, ironically, is true to the game — though probably not what the filmmakers were aiming towards.
Reflecting on this gave me a new perspective. There are worse things in the world than A Minecraft Movie. Chief among them is Donald Trump, the culprit behind the aforementioned Financial Times front page.
Whether or not Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves went to see A Minecraft Movie over the weekend, we’ll probably never know. But from their relative nonchalance in the face of market chaos - from the Jaguar Land Rover assembly line in Solihull - I’d say they probably didn’t.
If they had, they might have come away with a fresh sense of perspective — the kind that’s already dawned on most world leaders, economists, billionaires, steelworkers in Scunthorpe, and just about everyone else except Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves: the current US president is a human hand grenade.