Stop excusing bad video game movies

Words cannot describe the depths of my despair upon seeing the trailer for the Minecraft movie.

Like many of my generation, Minecraft was a constant companion throughout my life. I was practically raised by Minecraft YouTubers, learning English from them at the age of 6 or 7 years old. The moment I was allowed to have a real amount of money in middle school, Minecraft Java Edition on the family computer was one of my first purchases. To this day, I regularly log onto a 7-year-old single-player world to do upkeep and expand my base, adding new sections and features with every update. Minecraft is a game of love, care and joy that has shaped me into the person I am. 

Rumors of a Minecraft movie have existed for almost as long as I’ve been a fan of the game. We got confirmation in 2014 that Warner Bros. acquired the rights to a movie and that production had started. However, over the next decade, news of production became fewer and farther between until most just assumed the project had been quietly scrapped and sent to the Warner Bros. movie graveyard.

It was quite a shock, then, when on Sept. 4, 2024, Warner Bros unleashed the trailer for “A Minecraft Movie.” It was horrendous. It’s the movie equivalent of a pug: It’s been put through the studio production process so many times that the people in charge have acclimated to such a mistake of creation any respectable person would recognize it to be. Upon opening the video, the viewer is assaulted with terrible lighting and visuals, cringeworthy writing and a world that doesn’t even look like vanilla Minecraft. There’s something to hate for everyone; fans of the game can be baffled by the crafting scene where Jason Momoa (“Aquaman”) crafts an item that doesn’t exist from a crafting recipe that also doesn’t exist, while everyone else can stare at the sheep with human teeth and have flashbacks to the Sonic movie. The morning after the trailer dropped, I decided to head online to read some other people’s thoughts — at the very least, I hoped I’d find some people to commiserate with. However, instead of doing their jobs and reviewing the teaser as the star-studded major studio production it is, movie reviewers are handing that job over to their 10-year-old children.

To their credit, the 10-year-olds also think “… it looks pants” (British kid slang for “bad”). My issue is less with the opinions of children and more with the fact that studios are given a pass for making an atrocious movie because it’s based on a video game — since that video game doesn’t have explicit and gratuitous blood or sex, it’s clearly beneath any sort of serious consideration. For one, 10-year-olds aren’t even Minecraft’s core demographic. While the game can be enjoyed by a wide range of audiences, its main player base has primarily become teenagers and young adults. There are many features of the game, such as redstone, that are not for 10-year-olds. Hell, there are technical components of the game that I have tried and failed to grasp. These days, I watch and am involved in the fandom communities of quite a few Minecraft YouTubers and have made many friends in those spaces. A lot of the YouTubers I watch would be rated as PG-13, and likewise, the friends I’ve met have ranged from older teens to full adults age-wise. The fact that the movie is exclusively geared towards a young age group indicates that the people making it hold no love or knowledge of the game and its community, having effectively excluded the majority of it. That should be a point of critique rather than an excuse to not do your job. 

Besides, since when did we restart excusing terrible movies because they’re “for kids?” Children, as much as society refuses to acknowledge it, have brains capable of forming human thoughts. They have taste, opinions and the ability to understand complex storylines. Some of the greatest stories of our generation have been “for kids,” and some have won awards as prestigious as the Oscars. Ten-year-olds can also tell when a movie sucks, and they deserve good movies.

The LEGO Batman Movie” was marketed toward a similar age range and based on source material that was perceived as only “for kids” at the time: LEGO. It’s ridiculous and over-the-top with the movie’s ending involving the LEGO people physically stacking on top of each other to hold the two pieces of Gotham together, followed up by a celebratory musical finale. The writing is very direct and the moral of the story is shoved in your face at every instance. Despite this, “The LEGO Batman Movie” is widely loved as an entertaining and hilarious movie for children and adults alike. It also enjoys high critic reviews, scoring an astounding 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. This is because the movie was written to be a good movie. The visuals were stylish and purposeful, the dialogue was witty and natural and, as shown by the ample references to other Batman series, it was made by people who cared about the media deeply and earnestly. This also meant that despite casting well-known actors such as Michael Cera (“Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”), they were clearly there as the actor who best fit the role, rather than just for the name brand. Like, why is Jack Black in this movie? Even ignoring that he looks nothing like Steve, the little personality the player character exhibits in game trailers shows the player to be curious, determined and deeply earnest, which are not the vibes I get from the grizzled mentor role they’d shoved him into. It’s a similar situation to Link in his 2006 show reincarnation; technically he doesn’t have a canonical characterization, but that definitely wasn’t it. 

You can’t exactly use the excuse of not being familiar with the source material either; the Minecraft community isn’t lacking for presence on the internet. In an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, director Jared Hess (“Napoleon Dynamite”) claims that “trying to adapt something that doesn’t have a story” is a challenge. Minecraft does have a story. It isn’t explicit, nor is it a required part of the game, but anyone who’s spent any meaningful amount of time with the game can see the story of the world in its expansive abandoned dungeons, scattered music discs and achievements guiding you toward the End dimension and end of the game. 

Throughout a typical single-player playthrough of Minecraft, you’re often met with a feeling of loneliness and melancholy — you’re a small, small player navigating alone in a big, big world, and somehow, you persist. Maybe you need the call to adventure and follow the path the universe has given you to the End, or maybe you dream of sunlight and trees instead and settle down and build a home. Either way, this feeling that’s created through every aspect of game design — from structure generation to the beautiful non-diegetic background music — is a core component of what Minecraft is. However, instead of going with the beautiful world already in the games, Hess and Warner Bros decided that a terrible “Jumanji” rip-off with the most grating “hey fellow kids” dialogue ever written by professional writers was the surefire route.

When you free the End dimension from the Ender Dragon for the first time, you’re given a poem, written by Julian Gough: 

and the universe said I love you

and the universe said you have played the game well 

and the universe said everything you need is within you

and the universe said you are stronger than you know 

In Minecraft, the universe believes in you. The universe is kind and loves you, and you, the player, are the most dynamic moving part of that universe. This is the story of Minecraft. This poem is one of the most meaningful pieces of writing in my life — I decorated my high school graduation cap with the end poem and one day hope to get a tribute to it as a tattoo. That being said, it would take nothing short of a miracle to spend my hard-earned money to see “A Minecraft Movie.” There are about two million other gripes that I didn’t talk about just in the minute and a half of footage we’ve been shown, from the inconsistent sizing of blocks — consistent block sizes are perhaps the most basic “rules” of the game universe — to the constant swapping between props looking real and pixelated. The most tragic part of it all, though, is that there are going to be two paths for the industry after “A Minecraft Movie” finally comes out: Either the movie flops hard despite the huge brand name and studios are spooked from touching video games for the next 20 years, or the movie earns a ton of money despite being empty and soulless, and studios decide that this is the bar of quality for video game adaptations.

Video games deserve better from Hollywood than either of those outcomes. Video game movies deserve directors, writers and producers who love and cherish them. They deserve to exist beyond being soulless cash grabs, in the totality of their worlds and stories. They deserve to be praised when good and, yes, just as harshly criticized as any other movie when bad. I can bet you that no one in charge of this movie knows the end poem. They didn’t know that they were making a story about a world that loves you and that the player loves in return. Clearly, none of them ever played the game for long enough to see it. “A Minecraft Movie” is likely going to be a bad movie, and when it sucks, I expect to see it receive the full brunt of criticism and hate it deserves. Don’t let it get away with being “just a video game movie” — treat it as the insult to fans that it is.

Daily Arts Writer Lin Yang can be reached at yanglinj@umich.edu.

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