It is with a sense of incredulity that I find myself writing a review of A Minecraft Movie, which is a huge blockbuster hit.

I saw it in a theater filled with rows of boys from preteen through late teens, all of whom applauded at the end. I didn’t applaud at the end, because the movie is terrible. Though unfortunately, it isn’t even bad enough to be interesting.

A Minecraft Movie is tired, perhaps because this overworked material has been in development in Hollywood since 2014, with innumerable writers and directors trying to make something movie-like out of it. It’s got crappy cut-rate CGI that looks like all the other crappy cut-rate CGI that’s been shoved in our faces for decades. There are a bunch of dull characters having dull adventures, and shit-tons of voice-over exposition that goes on so long that it becomes hallucinatory. You wonder if you’ve been sitting in the theater for hours listening to Jack Black explain about how he’s a goofball named Steve who wants to be a miner but no one in the oppressive small town of Chuglass, Idaho, will let him pursue his creative dream. (Who has a creative dream to be a miner?) But then he breaks into a mine and pickaxes out some damn thing that propels him into the fantastical Overworld where he can create anything he imagines as long as it’s cube-shaped and so on and so on, until the opening credits finally appear and you realize with a jolt of horror that the movie has only just begun.

A Minecraft Movie is just as tired as Jack Black, playing Steve, appears to be. A dull-eyed graybeard now, he’s doing exactly the same schtick he’s done since playing a fanatical young live wire with the kinetic quality of a wildly bouncing ball in High Fidelity (2000) and School of Rock (2003).

Jason Momoa is also going through his paces playing Garrett “the Garbageman” Garrison, a formerly celebrated gaming champion fallen on hard times, who can’t accept the reality that no one thinks he’s cool anymore. How can I be so sick of Jason Momoa? I guess I was vaguely aware that he was part of the Game of Thrones juggernaut, but really, I’ve hardly seen Momoa other than in that first outing as Aquaman in some godforsaken DC Universe movie back in 10,000 BC. I guess A Minecraft Movie generates such a pall of ennui — such a sense of being long since outmoded yet somehow still here in theaters — it envelops everything and everybody in the dust of centuries.

Not that my reaction matters in the least. This isn’t a movie made for me. It’s a “family movie” that desperate G- or PG-rated genre allowing parents and guardians to offload their kids for a while. If they’re lucky, there are enough laughs in the “family movie” to keep the world-weary adults slightly entertained as well. Since Snow White tanked, there’s clearly a big familial gap being filled by A Minecraft Movie.

A Minecraft Movie is, of course, an adaptation of the best-selling video game of all time. My godsons used to play Minecraft obsessively, until their mother told me she swore if she had to listen to those stupid square sheep baa-ing one more time, she was gonna lose it. Minecraft was released in 2009, meaning a possible sixteen years of manic gameplay, with younger players joining in all the time. This adds up to masses of people trooping to the theater to wallow in nostalgia for their earlier childhood joys. Blue-shirted Steve, the bland yet iconic Minecraft character, got a shoutout from the audience in my theater as soon as he appeared onscreen.

There are three worlds intersecting in this movie. There’s harsh reality, where we meet our unhappy characters. Steve escaped early, in the prologue, but adults like Garrett and Dawn (Danielle Brooks) have gone on working rotten jobs or trying to keep shaky small businesses going. Newly orphaned kids Natalie (Emma Myers) and Henry (Sebastian Hansen) move to the depressingly limited town of Chuglass, facing an oppressive future. They all get pulled through a porthole into the Overworld of cube-shaped beings apparently thriving in a lush Disneyesque landscape where imagination rules. Except for the fact that the sun sets every twenty minutes, unleashing the attack of the night-creatures that must be fought off by these newbies, including square-headed zombies, skeletons, and giant spiders.

And then there’s the Nether, an underworld populated by swine-people called “piglins” in a hellscape of toil under the harsh rule of gold-fixated tyrant Malgosha (voice of Rachel House), who’s plotting an Overworld takeover.

Assorted great comic talents are peppered through the film, such as Jennifer Coolidge, Jemaine Clement, Matt Berry, and Kate McKinnon, playing small roles or providing character voices. Director Jared Hess himself voices General Chungus, a formidable battle piglin with an incongruously high, vapid voice, who’s Malgosha’s chief henchman.

Before I saw A Minecraft Movie, I had a tiny, delusional glint of hope that Hess might make something good out of it. These ghastly IP movies based on unpromising source material occasionally throw out an unlikely winner, such as The Lego Movie (2014), for example. And I’d liked Hess’s insightful and offbeat Napoleon Dynamite so much, I was always hoping he’d fulfill his early promise. Goddamn, how long ago was Napoleon Dynamite? 2004. Seems like eons have passed since then, and those eons have not been good to the cinema.

It was once considered an art form — seriously! — and it was a consistently enjoyable communal entertainment experience as well. Movies were once aimed primarily at adult audiences, who used to pack theaters to the limit in screening after screening. In the olden days, even the cartoons that appeared before features were surprisingly brilliant — thinking of Looney Tunes cartoons in particular. It’s all ages ago now. The cinematic experience has been on life support for decades. I’d say somebody should call the official Time of Death on the movies, but people have been calling it for years and years and years now.

We’re well into the time of zombie cinema now, and not in a good way. The few films that make it to theaters or even online streaming that still have some genuine life left in them seem like amazing survivors that’ve lasted through relentless waves of attacks by soul-killing, body-eating ghouls. Which ironically sounds like the Minecraft Movie characters — stuck in a world where night falls every twenty minutes.