Oh, to be blissfully unaware of the horrors that awaited in the teaser trailer for the Minecraft movie.
But it’s too late. A teaser for the much-anticipated, 10-years-in-the-making Minecraft movie has dropped, along with any semblance of fan interest.
As far as video games go, Minecraft is a household name. Released in 2009 by indie developer Markus Persson, the game quickly took the world by storm with its near-limitless potential. Players can do just about anything they want in this ever-expanding voxel-based sandbox, including constructing a castle, mowing down monsters and discovering dilapidated dungeons.
Since its release, Minecraft has come to be known as the second-best-selling video game of all time, with over 300 million copies sold across a plethora of platforms.
Considering the breadth of the game’s reach, it’s no wonder that in 2014, news broke of a film adaptation in the works.
Ten years later, fans got their first look at “A Minecraft Movie,” a live action take on the beloved block-based title.
The teaser opens with a brilliantly animated, high-definition version of the typical Minecraft world, blocky and bustling.
Then enter the live action actors, including Jason Momoa’s unnamed and unremarkable character, who is an adult man in a pink jacket. The actors could not contrast more starkly with the animated setting. As the characters presumably walk through a portal and are transported to the world of Minecraft, they look in awe at the world around them — which is just an obvious green screen — before the trailer cuts to what is most accurately described as an eldritch abomination: the sheep.
The iconic sheep in Minecraft are known for their simplicity and boxiness. However, in this movie teaser, the sheep are anything but simple, being inexplicably animated to be furry to a fault.
The teaser goes on to tell little about the plot besides the idea that the piglins, a race of anthropomorphic pig people who live in a flaming underworld dimension called the Nether, are invading the Overworld, the Earth-like dimension in which the game takes place.
The teaser also reveals in underwhelming fashion that Jack Black will play the role of Steve, the blocky, default player character in Minecraft who, like much of the game, is meant to be a blank canvas for characters to fill in.
Black’s character is completely live action, and the costumes are so basic as to look like casual clothes a college student might wear, and so audiences are left with no connection to the iconic character beyond Black saying, “I am Steve.”
Unfunny, uninspired, underwhelming: The Minecraft movie appears to ride the latest wave of failed video game adaptations meant to cash in on beloved intellectual properties using star-studded casts. “Borderlands,” which Black also features in, was one of the worst-rated video game adaptations in recent memory despite its talented cast, and the “Uncharted” film didn’t fare much better.
The most recent successful adaptation was the well-received “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” which had similar anticipation as the Minecraft film. Despite having a similar premise as the Minecraft film, featuring a group of people transported from the real world to a fantasy world, this film understood what its audience wanted and was completely animated and loyal to the source material.
The “Sonic” films, while live-action, have similarly been successful, but for one key reason: They listened to fans. Despite a disastrous first trailer that showed a terrifying live-action rendition of the beloved blue hedgehog, Paramount Pictures listened to fan backlash and reworked the CGI for Sonic to make his look more consistent with the games.
There have been no plans announced to rework the Minecraft movie, but that is to be expected. To rework the garish clash between live action and animation that features actors walking around on endless green screen sets, to rework the uncanny detail contained in the world’s animals, to rework the bland cast and dialogue to be any sort of interesting would require the studio to start from scratch; however, 10 years, hundreds of millions of dollars and several directors later, it’s maybe a bit too late to start from square one — or block one.
