I still vividly remember the first time I beat Minecraft. I was six, maybe seven-years-old, playing on my dad’s computer that could barely run the game. I had spent hours in this world preparing to beat the final boss, and once I did what I saw confused me.
It was the poem before the end credits. Something I had never seen before in any YouTube video I watched of someone beating the game.
It was completely new territory and it was almost thrilling because of the novelty. However, I didn’t really understand a word of the poem. It was too complicated for my elementary brain.
“You are alive / and the universe said I love you because you are love / And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream / And the player began a new dream,” the poem reads.
Essentially, it is saying “don’t waste all your time on the game, because the game is a dream world.” In the game, you play God. The world is yours to create and mold; it’s a sandbox. The ending tells you that there’s a world outside of the game, and you don’t get to play God in it but you can certainly try to make it better.
Evidently, this game is something special to me. This is why when I saw the teaser recently released by Warner Brother Studios for “A Minecraft Movie,” a piece of me nearly died.
Based on the teaser, the movie looks cheaply made for a $150 million budget, lacks understanding of the source material and the production of a Minecraft movie overall is a testament to the death of creativity in Hollywood.
The graphics struggle to find a balance between the style of traditional Minecraft and the production’s desire for realism. In the first 10 seconds, there’s a shot of the main characters entering the game world.
Immediately there is a noticeable difference between the blocky outlines of the mountains and hills and the hyperrealism of the main characters and flora. It seems like a poor attempt at reconciling the live actors and the video game setting, which is counterintuitive to the integrity of the game.
Minecraft was always meant to look like a game. The blocks and the pixelated textures were a deliberate stylistic choice. Players were never meant to feel immersed.
By using real actors instead of animating the whole movie, this stylistic choice, in some ways representative of the whole game, is completely undermined. This ties into the next criticism: a lack of understanding for the source material.
Minecraft is basically the pinnacle life simulation game. You start off as a caveman and eventually grow and build something akin to civilization. It’s about creativity and finding purpose.
The game not having a real plot makes it difficult to conceptualize and develop a movie based on it; evidently as production has completely missed the mark with the plot. The movie is about “four misfits who are pulled into the Overworld, a ‘bizarre, cubic wonderland that thrives on imagination.’”
It’s “Jumanji.” It is quite literally the plot of “Jumanji.”
Which brings me to the final nail in the coffin for this movie. Hollywood ran out of ideas about 10 years ago. When you’re recycling the plot of a 1995 movie that already got a 2017 sequel, what’s the point?
What is the value in creating this piece? What does it add to the game? What does it add to the themes of the game? What does it add to the series? It adds virtually nothing.
It’s not that art has to be deep or meaningful to be able to exist. Art can exist for the sake of existing, but that’s the issue; it’s not for the sake of existing either.
It’s just for money.
In an interview, director Jared Hess said, “I just can’t disappoint the 10-year-olds, or they’re going to murder us.”
This quote, most likely meant as a funny one-liner, perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with the movie. Will there be 10-year-olds in the audience when the movie comes out? Most definitely, but that should not be the target demographic.
The target audience should mostly be GenZ and younger millennials. People who have fond memories of playing the game when it first came out. People who were raised on the game and have overwhelming nostalgia and love for it.
To me, this quote shows that Hess has no knowledge of what the game means to many people. All that does is dishearten me, seeing a franchise that means so much to me be ruined with unfunny Marvel humor all to line people’s pockets.
