The Minecraft Movie: First Impressions

The first teaser for the Minecraft movie is here! After almost 10 years of production, will the movie live up to its legacy, or will fans around the world be let down?

By: Aryan Bachu, Ian Tan, and Taran Nulu

On September 4th, the first teaser for the long-awaited Minecraft movie was released. Early production on the film started in 2016 but was delayed due to several complications. As Minecraft is the most sold game in history, with over 300 million copies sold, expectations for the first look at the movie were high. However, these expectations were crushed. The teaser released on YouTube received an astonishing 1.6 million dislikes, compared to its 675 thousand likes. 

It starts off with the four protagonists of the movie—Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrios, Henry, and Natalie—wandering into the Minecraft world through a portal, perplexing them all. As the gang stumbles their way through the confusing new world, they run into Minecraft’s icon: Steve, played by Jack Black in a blue shirt. Steve is there to help them understand the intricacies of the world that is so foreign to them. The movie’s antagonists seem to be piglins and zombie piglins, monsters from Minecraft. Along with these piglins and several other Minecraft monsters, the group encounters several roadblocks on their journey home.

Though under heavy criticism, the Minecraft movie has a lot of creative ideas and adaptations. One of the key scenes that highlight the director’s creativity is when the piglins use the ghasts as hot air balloons. This gives the audience a new perspective on the hostile mobs in Minecraft, provoking thought, and further engaging the audience. There is also an immense attention to detail, it is clear through analyzing the trailer that they paid attention to each and every frame. A great example of this is 36 seconds into the trailer, we see a restaurant in the background with a sign that says “Steve’s Lava Chicken”. Even though they show it for a split second, they still put a lot of detail in the movie.

Even though the movie has a lot of work put into it, there are a lot of fundamental aspects that they got wrong. The animation style and the choice to make the characters live-action while the universe is pixelated is another bad decision that resulted in lots of community backlash. The creators of the movie also made other fundamental mistakes, one of the most prominent ones being giving a Piglin Brute a gold sword instead of an axe, and giving the regular piglins iron swords. This shows that movie directors did not really research the game, and it feels low-effort from the audience’s perspective.

Being consistent plays a big part in movies, and it really makes the film professional, especially if it’s eventually going through theaters. For example, if we pay attention to little details, like the shape of the lava and water, we can raise the question: why does the lava have a block-like shape, but the water doesn’t? The flowy waterfall seems very out of place in this world full of blocks. Another part of the movie that seems out of place are the actors, namely Jack Black, playing Steve. Steve is the first character or “skin” you get to play as in Minecraft, with brown hair and blue eyes. But when Jack Black appears in the teaser, we see him with nothing but a blue shirt to represent his character.

Teasers are first impressions, they put us on edge and give us an idea of what the movie is actually about. However, through the short teaser we saw, there wasn’t really much of a story or anything to look forward to. If the teaser were to be extended a little and include what’s really in the story, this would greatly increase our excitement around this movie!

Source: The Minecraft Movie Teaser, Warner Brothers, Official Teaser