The Minecraft Trailer Needs to be Fed To a Creeper

Photo by Eric Haines, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Video games have an … uneven history of trying to transition to movies or television. There have been the occasional successes: HBO’s The Last of Us got glowing reviews; the animated Super Mario Bros. Movie was decent and made trainloads of money; the Angelina Jolie Tomb Raider movies were decent, mostly because of the lead actress; Resident Evil became a healthy franchise although I’m still not clear on why.

But most have been forgettable. And some have been terrible. So it was with some trepidation that I saw a Minecraft movie was being made. Because Minecraft … doesn’t have a story. That’s what makes it great. You just build stuff. It’s a giant sandbox for people to build all kinds of crazy things. My own Minecraft world has a tower made of obsidian with an observatory at the top. A few clicks away, I built a giant observatory with a series of doors that open to improve airflow. My son’s world had giant statues of Super Mario. Anything goes.¹

In any case, this week the Minecraft Movie trailer dropped and … well, it’s definitely something.

I have watched the trailer a few times now and I’m still not convinced this isn’t a dream after eating a moldy burrito. Even YouTube reactors, who are normally enthusiastic about everything, have been left bumfuzzled and dumfounded by this thing. I haven’t seen this many people stare in silence at a screen since I taught the big astronomy class online.

Look, maybe this movie will be awesome in a bonkers kind of way. If nothing else, Jack Black can usually elevate even the most mediocre movie to watchable. Initial impressions aren’t always right, especially with something that challenges the medium. People rioted when Rite of Spring debuted² but now it’s a musical classic.

But … this don’t look no Rite of Spring.

1. Although, I did sort of come up with a Minecraft origin story because … it’s what my brain does. In my origin story, the main character has been dropped off by a spaceship to investigate why a distant colony has gone silent. He finds mute villagers, zombie pigmen and animated skeletons, the result of some unthinkable calamity. He eventually traces it back to the Endermen and the Ender Dragon’s influence. He kills the dragon, gets the egg, uses it to restore the colony and then sets off the beacon as a sign his mission has succeeded. I realize this make no sense to anyone who hasn’t played the game and even less sense to anyone who has played it since about 2021. But I tend to weave these little stories to make sense of things.
2. Maybe