I tried looking for videos of people playing through the story. All I found were builders and a weird game of hide-and-seek.
In the time since I have heard that there is indeed lore in Minecraft. The idea of a live-action Minecraft movie is still dumb, however. However, it seems that while Jason Momoa is actually in this movie it will be Jack Black playing the live-action Steve, and this is not an improvement.
The annoying thing is that I planned to never to a teaser review again because teasers tell you nothing. We don’t know the plot, we don’t know who is playing whom outside of Jack Black…oh, wait, there’s the plot in the description for the teaser post I’m using. Well, this should be easier then…to go over everything this is doing wrong as an adaptation thus far.
The funny thing, which is not something that would otherwise be said about this teaser, is I’m not really a Minecraft player. There is the main game, some side stories, comics, books, and a lot of people streaming it online. I’ve seen some really interesting done with the mechanics of the game despite having less to work with than games like Second Life or Roblox. Don’t jump on me for mentioning Second Life by the way. I find it interesting that new G4 took time to make fun of it when old G4 was the one that introduced and thought it was amazing. If someone can make giant private parts in Minecraft, you shouldn’t be surprised that open source virtual worlds would do worse. Meanwhile I own a Tim Burton Batmobile, at least three different TARDIS types, a Colonial Viper, and more cars, planes, helicopters, boats, spaceships, and combination vehicles than I’ll ever have in real life. Granted I’ve never heard of a working phone that can connect to the real world in Second Life, so points to Minecraft. I’ll salute you from the cockpit of one of my 1970s Buck Rogers starfighters.
No, I’m not giving you my SL name.
Okay, enough front page padding…which is totally not a delaying tactic no sir. Let’s watch this teaser and see just what this thing does wrong when it comes to promoting a movie based on a kids game where you build with block that isn’t LEGO related.
Welcome to the world of Minecraft, where creativity doesn’t just help you craft, it’s essential to one’s survival! Four misfits—Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen), Natalie (Emma Myers) and Dawn (Danielle Brooks)—find themselves struggling with ordinary problems when they are suddenly pulled through a mysterious portal into the Overworld: a bizarre, cubic wonderland that thrives on imagination. To get back home, they’ll have to master this world (and protect it from evil things like Piglins and Zombies, too) while embarking on a magical quest with an unexpected, expert crafter, Steve (Jack Black). Together, their adventure will challenge all five to be bold and to reconnect with the qualities that make each of them uniquely creative…the very skills they need to thrive back in the real world.
Why is “The Garbage Man” in quotes? Is he going to be a wrestler or an actual trash man? Will Danny DeVito get mad? He’s the only character with a full name. Okay, so the Piglins and Zombies are two of the opponents in the games, both the main one and the Minecraft sidestory games that go into the lore through narrative gameplay rather than regular Minecraft’s open world exploration, where you have to stumble upon the various hidden lore areas in the game in search for more materials to craft with and protect yourself from enemies. However, Steve isn’t some expert crafter from our world. He’s a descendant of an ancient race called the Builders, who created many of the strange temples, devices, and according to Game Theory problems in the world of Minecraft. He’s not a visitor, he’s a resident. Having Garbage Man and ethnically diverse friends (I wouldn’t notice if it wasn’t so pointed out by Hollywood itself in so many projects today) presumably coming from our Earth to the Minecraft…dimension I guess just feels like someone wanted to do Tron or US isekai than properly set a story in the game’s world. That didn’t work so well in reverse for the Smurfs. Just do a Minecraft story in the Minecraft world.
There are two things that give me flashbacks to the trailers for the live-action Dora The Explorer movie. One is that Steve is, as one of the kids stated, a “toolbag”. In the game you play Steve or his not as famous girl counterpart (in case you’d rather play as a girl, while Steve can have different skin colors in the creator menu I think) as they travel around the world building things, talking to the local villagers, and traveling to underground and underwater locations as well as the kid-friendly hellscape called The Nether, learning about your ancestral past, building things to protect yourself and advance your land, and fighting various “mobs” for control and survival. Steve isn’t even the name of your character, just the face of the franchise with a chosen design. The characters that both Black and Momoa play would be wrong for Steve as presented elsewhere.
The other bit of mocking comes from the namesake mechanic of the game that we see. We don’t see the mining, but we do see the crafting, and it doesn’t work like that. I mean, it does in the game, but this isn’t the game. It’s only physically the world of the game. I could see if this was a fully immersive Minecraft world experience, like so many other Minecraft productions I haven’t seen. If they do the bit where they smash the ingredients and have it form into what they want, that would work. This is five humans in the Minecraft world, so I expect crafting to work the same way it would in real life, where you take the materials or ingredients and actually have to put them together. You don’t do that in the game because it would take too long, bore the kids and even most adults, and take time away from beating up pigs and pig people. Here, crafting is magic, but what we see lacks the whimsy and rules of the usual blocky characters to make that believable. You can’t shove us into a fake world and translate a game mechanic so exactly. It doesn’t work. It’s as bad as having Minecraft characters enter our world but still look all blocky. Who wants to bet that happens in the final act?
Meanwhile we also have to ask…why are there five human characters when the rest of the world is still Minecraft? Is it like the virtual Jumanji sequel? Or Tron? Or the Matrix? Captain N? Hopefully not the Playmobile movie, because that failed miserably trying to be the LEGO movies and got so much wrong. Even then the movie was smart enough to have the kids turn into Playmobile type beings rather than leave them human because they wanted to show off the actors they got. Just make it a fully animated movie in the Minecraft style. Official movies have been made this way. Fans have made machinima using the ingame Minecraft world to tell stories apart from the usual lore, and there’s a lot of official lore to go with. You don’t even have to play the games. Fire up Twitch and do a search for Minecraft. There are channels that only play Minecraft. Learning about this game is easy. Game Theory still does Minecraft lore because there’s a lot of it out there.
Teasers exist to get you excited until they’re ready to drop the actual trailer, which is supposed to get you excited for all the other trailers that will come out until they finally release the movie they’re really hoping you’ll be excited for. That’s how the hype machine stays in business promotes the movie. So far this looks like Warner Brothers’ biggest video game misstep since they ruined Atari.
Also, I’m dropping this in because I think it’s funny.
BW Media Spotlight 