Summary
A Minecraft Movierecently hit theaters to mostly negative and confused reactions from audiences. The announcement of the Minecraft movie and the trailers that followed took the internet by storm earlier this year. The decision to cast Jack Black as Steve was an interesting one, as Steve in the game has no personality or dialogue. He was designed with the intention of being a blank canvas any player could assume the role of. To have the charismatic Jack Black assume that role wasnot the obvious casting choice, but for the most part, fans gave this choice the benefit of the doubt. Jack Black is widely loved, and it’s well known that he is a big gamer himself.
The trailers were instantly memed by the internet, particularly the scenes where Jack Black announces the items from the game as a not-so-subtle acknowledgment of the source material. It seemed from the start thatA Minecraft Moviewouldn’t try to take itself too seriously, and would instead focus on creating a fun action-packed story based onMinecraft. However, the movie somehow managed to fail at achieving even that.
The Movie Spent Too Much Time On Earth
The majority of the movie’s opening act takes place in an American suburb called Chuglass on Earth, where the audience meets the rest of the cast before they arrive in the Overworld (the Minecraft world). By itself, this is not a bad thing. For the movie’s structure to make sense, it would need to have some set-up and exposition scenes to get the audience invested in the characters and their motivation.
ButA Minecraft Moviestays on Earth for a little too long without achieving much. By modern standards,A Minecraft Moviehas a short runtime for a feature-length movie, at 1 hour and 41 minutes. This is why it makes even less sense for the movie to spend so much time on Earth. Even after the charactersmake the jump to the Overworld, the movie returns to Earth for the concluding act.
It seems like a waste to adapt a source material with almost boundless potential (a sandbox video game) and not spend much time exploring that potential. If the movie was the length of a standard feature-length movie (2–2.5 hours), this might have been justified. To use time that could have been spent exploring aMinecraftadaptation on forgettable characters' expositions was a missed opportunity.
Misrepresentation Of The Game’s Logistics
Crafting Non-Existent Items
When the movie finally makes its way to the Overworld, it is quick to falsely portray some of the key aspects of the game. One of the major aspects ofMinecraftis, of course, crafting. The movie portrays crafting ina fun, game-accurate way, where the characters place the items in a pattern on top of the crafting table and the crafted product magically appears in place of the items.
However, the actual items being crafted are not items that appear in the game. For example, Henry creates a potato launcher, a ‘tot launcher,’ which he crafts using tater tots. This could be explained by saying that Henry is able to craft new items because he’s using items from the real world. However, Jason Momoa’s character, Garret Garrison, also crafts some sort of bucket/nunchuck combination using only iron from the Overworld, which disproves that theory.
Bizarre Mob Behavior
The representation of the iconic ‘mobs’ in the game is also completely different. It’s fair for the film to take some creative liberties with aspects of the game. Obviously, the mobs in the game don’t talk with Australian accents, but this humanizes them and allows for some humorous scenes in the movie. However, it seems like the moviedoesn’t understand or is choosing to ignorethe basic way mobs function in the game.
One of the most confusing scenes takes place when Henry (the child protagonist of the movie) is confronted by an Enderman. Steve warns everyone prior to this scene to not look at the Enderman in the eye for their safety. This is accurate to the game: if aMinecraftplayer looks an Enderman in the eye, they become violent and start physically attacking the player.
However, when Henry makes this mistake, he starts hallucinating visions of his friends, discouraging him. This feature never appears in the game. It feels like the movie did this just to throw in acheap Herobrine Easter egg(Jack Black’s Steve has white shining eyes like the game’s infamous villain) without much care or respect to the game.
The Story Could Have Taken Place Anywhere
It’s hard to explain the plot ofA Minecraft Movie,because most of the story is based around a mix of random action scenes and comedic gags without pushing the narrative forward. Put simply, the characters living in Chuglass are teleported to the Overworld through a portal where they meet Steve, who asks for their help in rescuing his dog Dennis fromthe Nether Piglins. In exchange, he offers to help them get back home. It’s the basic story format where a group of misfits come together by chance in a foreign land and, with the help of a new mysterious character, come together to achieve a common goal. In other words, “it was the friends we made along the way”.
This narrative trope doesn’t really make sense forMinecraft, but more importantly, the movie doesn’t incorporate the game well enough to justify telling the story this way. The movie could have worked better if it put a funMinecraftspin on the typical adventure narrative audiences are used to. But instead, it feels like an exact copy of that format with theoccasional cheap reference to the game’s materialto remind the audience that they are in fact watching a movie based onMinecraft.
The forgettable narrative, tied with how much time the movie spends outside ofMinecraftonly to never faithfully explore and portray the video game, makes it very hard to argue that the creators ofA Minecraft Moviehad much respect for the fans of the beloved bestselling game.Rather, it feels like an attempt to cash inon the longstanding loyal fan base that hold the game very closely to their hearts.
