"A" Minecraft Movie starring "a" Rock

There was a lot more discussion of definite and indefinite articles than you might expecting going to and coming back from A Minecraft Movie on Sunday afternoon.

My older son had gone yesterday with his friends, so it was just my wife, my 11-year-old son and me heading to the Sun in Yarraville for the 2:30 showing.

On our drive over, we were talking about the cast, as Jack Black is one of a half-dozen actors I'm sure my son knows. One of the others is Dwayne Johnson.

Black and Johnson have teamed up twice in the Jumanji movies, to which this movie is not altogether dissimilar. (It is also not altogether dissimilar from The Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Lego Movie, but let's not get into a full review right now.) It occurred to me that although Johnson isn't in A Minecraft Movie, there's basically a Johnson type in the form of Jason Momoa. 

So I thought this was a pretty good quip on my part: "It doesn't star the Rock, but it does star a Rock."

It was when we were leaving at the end that I talked about the likelihood of a sequel because this was sure to make a lot of money this weekend. (Proof: My older son and his friends had to go to a later show yesterday, because the one they'd tried to see was sold out. He also told me that this second sold-out show had an enthusiastic crowd shouting along with memes that have already developed around this movie.)

Back to my younger son. He agreed that there would be a sequel but that it would probably not use any of the same characters. 

Because I am pig-headed, I had to take this as a teachable moment to explain how sequels work, that you want to bring back as many of the ingredients as possible that made the original a hit, because you can never be sure if the removal of one of them will be the thing that sinks the sequel. He insisted -- groundlessly, I'm sure, and I should have just let it go -- that indeed the sequel would not use the same characters.

There's some chance he's right -- he watches a lot more YouTube than I do -- but there's a far greater chance he's wrong. But the thing that was definitely wrong was what he considered to be his closing argument:

"It's called 'a' Minecraft Movie." The logic being that this is just one of many ways a person could make a Minecraft movie. 

Give me "a" break.