Critics should stop giving space to bad video game movies

Words cannot describe the depth of my despair when I saw the trailer for the Minecraft movie.

Like many of my generation, Minecraft has been a constant companion throughout my life. I practically grew up with Minecraft YouTubers and learned English from them when I was 6 or 7 years old. When I was allowed to have a lot of money in middle school, one of my first purchases was the Minecraft Java Edition on the family computer. To this day, I regularly log into a 7 year old single player world to do maintenance and expand my base, adding new sections and features with each update. Minecraft is a game full of love, care and joy that has shaped me into the person I am.

Rumors of a Minecraft movie have been around for almost as long as I've been a fan of the game. In 2014, we received confirmation that Warner Bros. had acquired the rights to a film and production had begun. Over the next decade, however, news of the production became increasingly scarce, until most simply assumed that the project had been quietly abandoned and sent to Warner Bros.'s film graveyard.

So it was quite a shock when Warner Bros. released the trailer for “A Minecraft Movie” on September 4, 2024. It was terrible. It's the film equivalent of a pug: it's been put through the studio production process so many times that those in charge have become accustomed to such a creational flaw that any decent human being would recognize. Upon opening the video, the viewer is confronted with terrible lighting and imagery, hideous text, and a world that doesn't even look like vanilla Minecraft. There's something for everyone to hate; Fans of the game may be amazed by the crafting scene, where Jason Momoa (“Aquaman”) crafts an item that doesn’t exist using a crafting recipe that also doesn’t exist, while everyone else can stare at the sheep with human teeth I have Flashbacks to the Sonic movie. The morning after the trailer was released, I decided to go online to read some other people's thoughts – at least I hoped I would find some people to express my sympathy with. But instead of doing their job and reviewing the teaser as the star-studded big studio production that it is, film reviewers are leaving that job to their 10-year-old children.

To their credit, the 10-year-olds also think, “…it looks like pants” (British children's slang for “bad”). My problem lies less with children's opinions and more with the fact that studios are given permission to produce a gruesome film because it is based on a video game – since that video game contains no explicit and gratuitous blood or sex, that is quite clear under any serious consideration. For one thing, 10-year-olds aren't even Minecraft's core demographic. While the game can be enjoyed by a wide audience, the main players are primarily teenagers and young adults. There are many features of the game, such as Redstone, that are not for 10 year olds. Heck, there are technical components of the game that I tried but couldn't understand. These days I watch and participate in the fandom communities of some Minecraft YouTubers and have made many friends in these areas. Many of the YouTubers I watch are rated PG-13, and the friends I've met also range in age from older teenagers to mature adults. The fact that the film is aimed exclusively at a young age group suggests that the people making it have no love or knowledge for the game and its community and have effectively excluded the majority from it. This should be a criticism rather than an excuse for not doing your job.

Besides, since when do we excuse 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 children” 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 to a similar age group and was based on source material that was considered only “for kids” at the time: LEGO. It's ridiculous and over the top because at the end of the film the LEGO people physically pile on top of each other to hold the two parts of Gotham together, followed by a celebratory musical finale. The writing style is very direct and the moral of the story is thrown in your face at every point. Nevertheless, “The LEGO Batman Movie” enjoys great popularity as an entertaining and hilarious film for children and adults. It also enjoys high critical reviews, scoring an astounding 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. That's because the film was written as a good film. The images were stylish and targeted, the dialogue was funny and natural, and, as the numerous references to other Batman series show, they were made by people who care deeply about the media. This also meant that despite casting well-known actors like Michael Cera (“Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”), they were clearly there as actors who best suited the role, and not just because of the brand. Why is Jack Black in this film? Even setting aside the fact that he looks nothing like Steve, the little personality that the player character shows in game trailers shows that he is curious, determined and deeply serious, which is not the vibe I get from the grizzled mentor role, into which they pushed him. It's a similar situation to Link in his reincarnation in the 2006 show; Technically he doesn't have a canon characterization, but The it definitely wasn't.

You can't necessarily use the excuse of not being familiar with the source material either; The Minecraft community has no lack of presence on the Internet. In an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, director Jared Hess (“Napoleon Dynamite”) claims that “trying to adapt something that has no story” is a challenge. Minecraft has a history. It's neither explicit nor a required part of the game, but anyone who has spent any amount of time with the game can see the story of the world in its sprawling, abandoned dungeons, scattered music CDs, and achievements that lead you to the final dimension and ending of the game.

During a typical single-player playthrough of Minecraft, you often feel a sense of loneliness and melancholy – you're a small, small player navigating a big, big world alone, and somehow you're stuck with it. Maybe you need the call to adventure and follow the path the universe has given you to the end, or maybe instead you dream of sunlight and trees, settling down and building a home. In any case, this feeling, created through every aspect of the game's design – from the structure generation to the beautiful, non-diegetic background music – is a core part of what Minecraft is. However, instead of enjoying the beautiful world already in the games, Hess and Warner Bros. decided that a terrible “Jumanji” rip-off with the most annoying “Hey kids” dialogue ever written by professional writers was the surefire way to go.

When you clear the End Dimension of the Ender Dragon for the first time, you will receive a poem by Julian Gough:

and the universe said, “I love you.”

and the universe said you played the game well

And the universe said that everything you need is within you

And the universe said you are stronger than you think

In Minecraft, the universe believes in you. The universe is friendly and loves you, and you, the player, are the most dynamic part of this universe. This is the story of Minecraft. This poem is one of the most meaningful works of my life – I decorated my high school graduation cap with the graduation poem and hope to get a tribute to it as a tattoo one day. That being said, spending my hard-earned money to watch “A Minecraft Movie” would be nothing short of a miracle. There are about two million other criticisms that I didn't talk about in the minute and a half of footage shown to us, from the inconsistent size of the blocks – consistent block sizes are perhaps the most basic “rules” of the game's universe – to the constant switching between props , which look real and pixelated. The most tragic thing about it, however, is that there will be two paths for the industry after A Minecraft Movie finally comes out: either the movie fails despite its big brand name and studios are afraid to touch video games for the next 20 years, or the Movies make a lot of money despite being empty and soulless, and studios decide that this is the benchmark for quality in video game adaptations.

Video games deserve more from Hollywood than any of these outcomes. Video game movies deserve directors, writers and producers who love and appreciate them. They deserve to exist in the entirety of their worlds and stories as more than just soulless money grabbers. They deserve praise when they're good, and as harsh criticism as any other film when it's bad. I can bet that no one responsible for this film knows the final poem. Little did they know they were making a story about a world that loves you and that the player loves in return. Apparently none of them have ever played the game long enough to see it. A Minecraft Movie is probably going to be a bad movie, and if it sucks, I expect it to receive the full brunt of the criticism and hate it deserves. Don't let it be “just a video game movie” – see it as the insult to fans that it is.

Daily Arts Writer Lin Yang can be reached at [email protected].

Related articles