Jacob Smith & Savannah Pennington
Opinions Editor and Staff Writer
After nearly 10 fruitless years in development, the first trailer for “A Minecraft Movie” was finally released on Sept. 4 to a monumental amount of backlash.
Minecraft is the highest-selling video game of all time, whose blocky aesthetic is its most recognizable trait and part of what makes the game accessible to people of all ages. So what did Warner Bros. decide to do with the film rights to Minecraft, a game all about creativity and imagination? They put Jack Black in a blue sweater and put him in front of a green screen.
“It looks like it was made in 2013, but released over ten years too late” John Townsend of FSC’s Esports team said.
The plot of the film follows the “Alice in Wonderland” approach of having the main characters end up in an unfamiliar world that they must explore in order to make it back home. But unlike “Alice in Wonderland,” which made use of the medium of animation to create an actual land full of wonder, “A Minecraft Movie” dares to answer the question: what if Minecraft, but real? And that’s about as far as they got into the creative process before deciding to attach big-name actors to the project, like Jack Black, Jason Momoa and Jennifer Coolidge.
From what we’ve seen so far of the film, “A Minecraft Movie” is the uncanny valley meets Legos. An example of this is what they did with the sheep. In the game, the sheep have silly faces with crossed eyes, make cute “baaing” sounds and their wool can be dyed into every color of the rainbow. The sheep shown in the trailer have all of these qualities, but the execution of them is where it gets ugly. Their crossed eyes make it seem like their in pain, which the screeching only doubles down on. The texture they decided to go with for the body looks more like one of those reversible pillows than a sheep’s wool.
The hyper-realistic yet ill-fitting textures and strange designs do not mesh well with the environment the characters are in. However, this stylistic choice was not applied to the human characters, making them stand out in a very unappealing way.
“It should have been fully animated instead of whatever they’ve settled on,” Cooper Tice of FSC’s ESports team said. “I can’t speak for how it’ll play out in terms of writing, but visually it’s all over the place.”
Shortly after the trailer’s release, a fan-made recreation was put out by the YouTube channel Alumio, which more accurately mimicked the style of the game. Many fans have commented on how much better the fan-made version looks in comparison to the live-action visuals.
Reddit user Codename-Dabed went as far as to say “Let’s make it another Sonic incident. We’ve bullied a studio to crack before, why not do it again?” The “Sonic Incident” refers to the original Sonic the Hedgehog design for the 2020 movie “Sonic the Hedgehog.” The grotesque design caused such an uproar from fans that the film release was delayed to redesign the Sonic animation model to make it more appealing. Minecraft’s movie director Jared Hess explicitly stated he wanted to avoid an ugly Sonic situation, but now that he has one, will any changes be made before the movie is set to release in April 2025?
At the moment, “A Minecraft Movie” is shaping up to be yet another poor video game movie adaptation. Many franchises have fallen victim to this curse, with the most recent one being “Borderlands.”
Scoring an impressively low 10% rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes and a D+ on CinemaScore, “Borderlands” is one of the worst-reviewed movies of 2024. If you’re a huge Borderlands fan, you probably didn’t like the movie. And if you saw it because you wanted to see a funny, action-packed adventure movie, you probably didn’t like it either because it was in fact not funny and the action was extremely generic. Key elements that make the Borderlands games what they are were hardly referenced in the movie, leaving viewers disappointed.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a great example of what a video game movie should be. It incorporates actual ideas from the game, it plays to the age range of the players, the animation is consistent and it doesn’t try to be overly edgy—something that the Super Mario games are not. The allusions to the games that were included made it clear that the movie was made by people who actually enjoy the source material, not people just making a movie adaptation just to make one.
Whether or not “A Minecraft Movie” does end up changing before release, it’s pretty much guaranteed to make a billion dollars. With the ugly Sonic situation, the movie wasn’t just concerned about appeasing the fans of the games, it was also meant to bring in a new generation of Sonic fans. Minecraft’s universally loved status means that as long as you can recognize the Creeper, then it doesn’t matter that the entire internet is upset.
