Just take a moment to look at the photo at the top of this post.
The expression on the faces of this motley gang of colorful characters is the exact expression that everyone watching the trailer is making. Disgust, confusion, disbelief. Even those of us who aren’t big Minecraft players can tell that this movie is destined to be a stinker.
Sometimes all you need is one trailer to lay bare just how bad a film will be. That’s all it took to make our assessments of the Borderlands movie, or the new Crow reboot. Now we have this dazzlingly dreadful trailer for a Minecraft movie that nobody in the fandom asked for, made by people who have apparently never asked themselves “Who is this movie for?” because this movie looks nothing like a movie actual Minecraft fans would want to watch.
Now maybe, as some have pointed out, this is appealing to younger kids and teens. Maybe older folks like your humble narrator are simply not the target audience. But I am not so divorced from my inner child and I believe—as someone who loves stuff made for kids—that I have a relatively good sense of what would work in a Minecraft movie. This, I am sad to report, ain’t it:
I like Jason Momoa and Jack Black, but having actors I like in a movie isn’t enough. I’m not even bothered by Momoa’s bizarre look—his weird wig and pink jacket might be the only thing this trailer has going for it.
But if you’re going the live-action route, having a group of kids and teens makes a lot more sense than whatever this is. I know that adults also play Minecraft, but this is still a franchise that is primarily for children. Jumanji had a group of adult leads, but that worked because it was actually a group of teens playing adults in the video game, and they still behaved very much their age.
What I can’t understand is why anyone would make such an unforced error. An animated Minecraft movie that actually looked more like the game (though perhaps prettier) with blocky main characters, simply makes far more sense than this soulless, low-effort abomination. I am aghast.
The only people excited about this trailer are the creators of the Borderlands movie who now, much to their relief, have a new contender for worst video game movie of the year. It’s funny, we had finally broken the video game adaptation curse with lots of different great films and TV shows from the Super Mario Bros movie to The Last Of Us, Arcane and Fallout. But it appears the curse was only mostly broken.
I’m afraid we’ll need more than Miracle Max to fix this one.
