OCT 10, 2024 | ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT | By Cate Rosenbaum
“A Minecraft Movie,” starring Jack Black, Jason Momoa and Emma Meyers, is slated to come out in 2025. The trailer has been released and the computer-generated imagery looks akin to the first version of the “Sonic the Hedgehog” movie, before the internet bullied the production team into a complete redesign. It’s possible with the amount of ire it’s facing, the Minecraft team might be convinced to do the same. But that’s not the movie I’m here to talk about.
“Minecraft but I survive in PARKOUR CIVILIZATION [Full Movie]” by YouTuber Evbo first came onto my radar when I was scrolling on X (formerly Twitter). I assumed the post was from a fan of Evbo, or an older sibling of their target audience, and I wrote it off. But a couple of hours later, my feed was filled with jokes about the video, each with tens of thousands of likes. People were calling out specific parts, live tweeting their watching experience and even logging it on Letterboxd — the movie was taken off the platform a few days later.
A reading list came out, featuring titles such as “Crime and Punishment,” “Animal Farm,” “Das Kapital” and “Divine Comedy.” I was an avid consumer of Minecraft YouTube when I was younger, and I know the content has changed, but there’s no possible way that kids’ videos have switched that much.
“Minecraft but I survive in PARKOUR CIVILIZATION [Full Movie]” currently sits at 25 million views and was uploaded on Dec. 18, 2023. Evbo has 2.75 million subscribers and nearly a billion views on his channel. Though he’s a popular creator, the memes around it have upped the video’s popularity — the majority of the top comments were posted in the past week.
I was curious. I had a flight this weekend. I downloaded the video and spent 114 minutes of my life engrossed in parkour civilization.
The first thing that hits you is Evbo’s voice. He speaks with a distinct cadence, high-pitched and almost nasally, with emphasis on nearly every word in a sentence. The voice is familiar if you’ve seen content aimed at children in the past few years. Words are pronounced clearly and enthusiastically — almost like a kid’s game show host.
But voice aside, I still found myself immersed. The reading list, which I initially assumed to be an ironic joke, didn’t turn out to be completely off-base. In a somewhat impressive feat, Evbo has managed to create a grounded dystopian world that challenges the structures of capitalist society through Minecraft, based around parkour.
Parkour civilization has no ground. Each block is spaced one apart from the other, with an endless void beneath. One wrong step, and you fall to your death. Evbo is a parkour ‘noob,’ (newbie) and thus lives on the lower level of society. Above, a dark mass hovers where the sky should be, where the parkour pros live. Every parkour noob’s goal is to climb the sacred parkour temple and become a pro.
Noobs have a hard life. They aren’t allowed to place or break blocks. They are only fed one piece of raw chicken or raw beef a day, but the raw beef sits one block higher, so no one takes the risk of falling to their death for a little extra food. Their nutrition only gives them two hunger bars, so they cannot run, and are only full enough to make it to the next day. Once a week, there are challenges for noobs to earn tickets to try and climb the temple and become a pro, but these jumps are often far and near impossible to do without full hunger.
In parkour civilization, everything is about parkour, including money. The harder the jump you complete, the more you are able to buy. During Evbo’s ticketing challenge, he does a 360 jump to bribe the judge and get an easier course. He gets a ticket, but as soon as he makes it to the temple, he misses his jump and falls into the void.
Evbo then wakes up in prison. He’s been sentenced to 50 years for falling. Here, they are forced to test out parkour challenges for the pros, and the ground is lava — so if you fall, you die for real. Again, Evbo is able to bribe his way back to the noob level, with the condition that he can never try to become a pro again. Back on top, however, he finds out they’ve already sold his house. The jumps are too difficult now for him to afford it again, so he’s forced to buy a cheaper, wooden home. There, he meets an old man living in his wall, who tells him he has a ticket buried in the outer land. Evbo journeys out there but only finds a random block. When he returns, the old man is gone, and a ticket sits in his place.
Evbo attempts the parkour temple again, and this time, he makes it to the top. On the final jump, though, he realizes it’s too far to physically make. He uses the block given to him by the old man, but without it, the course would be impossible. Why wouldn’t they want the noobs to be able to advance? Why would they set the course against them? Evbo’s wondering the same things as the viewer as he steps into the world of parkour pros.
However, life isn’t as it seems. Here, Evbo learns that parkour civilization is more complex than he ever dreamed. The world isn’t just split into parkour noobs and pros, but also masters and champions. Just as every noob dreamed to become a pro, every pro dreams of becoming a master. They’re given two cooked steaks every day, which gives him full hunger, and he is now able to sprint. Each day, pros get a new job, which they can exchange for time to practice parkour. Evbo, however, decides that his hunger is full, and he doesn’t need to practice one day, so he doesn’t show up for work — as no one’s forcing him. But even though there are no explicit rules set for parkour pros, the expectations are not meant to be broken. Conformity is law, and Evbo faces punishment for his transgression. He’s forced into a parkour battle against a master, and in a feat of luck, wins. The master gives him a totem of undying and tells him to use it to climb the pro temple.
Evbo completes the course, but not before discovering that invisible blocks must be used to complete otherwise impossible jumps. During his climb upward, someone tries to blow him up. On the master level, life is only harder. Parkour still acts as currency, but masters build their own courses. In order to make these courses, they have to own blocks. The number and type of blocks you own now determines if you are rich or poor. At one point, Evbo is challenged to a parkour battle where he must recreate the challenger’s course, but he doesn’t own the same blocks so he loses by default. His days are monotonous, working constantly in order to afford parkour master life. Where skill and labor were previously currency in their own right, it now must be used to achieve money and social capital.
Evbo eventually finds out the truth about the dystopian, “Animal Farm”-esque society he’s found himself in — that your very first jump on earth determines your placement. Evbo, and the viewer, calls this unfair. The champion is a tyrant, who wants nothing to change. Through a feat of challenges, Evbo is able to defeat the champion and become the new ruler of Parkour Civilization — but this time, for the good.
I didn’t think the movie would be great, and I wasn’t wrong: Evbo’s voice is constantly grating, and since the video is a compilation of a series, it jumps back into summaries right after cliffhangers. But there’s something unique about the world Evbo created. Though people, myself included, watched it in order to be in on the meme, I was genuinely impressed by the worldbuilding, and particularly the advent of money. It’s ironic to like something like this for kids, to compare it to “Crime and Punishment,” and it’s fun to make fun of, but… maybe the memes weren’t entirely ingenuine.
The idea that children can interact with ideas of social injustices and the constructs of labor versus capital in an accessible world for them makes me a little hopeful. Sure, Evbo’s voice was annoying, but he was a protagonist I could root for, and at the end of the day, he wasn’t talking to me. Evbo has created a universe for kids, where instead of “brain-rot” TikTok challenges, they can think about and understand concepts some adults won’t even engage with. And that, in my opinion, is a major feat in itself. So what if it’s a YouTube video? It’s right in the title: “Parkour Civilization” is a movie and one that can stand on its own.