The Minecraft trailer is a curse on my eyes

When I saw the trailer for the Minecraft film, my first reaction was, “I hate it.” To be honest, my second and third reactions were the same because I watched the trailer a few more times to see if what I saw was actually real and not some deluded fever dream. Nope, it really does look terrible.

I’m not sure there was one element of the trailer that looked good. I didn’t hate the look of the creepers and… no, that’s it. The problem is this constant forcing of live-action actors. It’s as if Warner Bros. didn’t believe wholeheartedly that Minecraft could put bums in seats, perhaps not realising that if you’re making a film of the biggest game the world has ever seen, it’s going to sell tickets.

As of right now, Minecraft has over 166 million active players. Even if only half of those players are kids, that’s 83 million people who will want to see a Minecraft film, you don’t need to shove Jack Black into a blue t-shirt and call him Steve to get a few more people through the door. If ever a game begged to be a swish animated production, it’s Minecraft.

Take a look at the trailer below.

There’s a comment in one of the many Reddit threads about the abysmal state of the trailer that hit the nail on the head, so thanks FriedSarlac, “The LEGO movie looked LEGO. This movie seems like it couldn’t decide on what it wanted to look like. The end result is the mishmash of whatever this is. Doesn’t work and looks bad.”

Let’s forget for a moment about Jack Black and Jason Momoa and focus on the visual style used in the trailer, one that some have said is equal to the original awful style of Sonic the Hedgehog before they went back to the drawing board.

Minecraft already has a distinct art style and while it wouldn’t translate to the big screen, it didn’t need to be pushed into what we have here; nightmare fuel that feels as if someone wrote “Minecraft realism film” into a 99p AI image creator on the App Store. I feel like I know what they were going for, it’s a 3D rendition of the ‘ugly’ imagery we used to get from Ren and Stimpy or SpongeBob SquarePants, that kind of grotesquery that somehow retains a cute image underneath.

However, it’s just not needed. Minecraft is, at this point, iconic, and while pixel graphics likely wouldn’t have gone over that well, the game’s style has been lost in this overprocessed attempt by Hollywood that it feels sterile. It lacks any sense of creativity or character.

But, let’s go back to Jack Black who appears as Jack Black but in a blue t-shirt, and Jason Momoa who looks, quite frankly, bored. When they were first attached to the film, it was when we weren’t sure what style of film this would be. It could still have emerged as an animated product and their voices would have lent the project some star power, if necessary. But shoving live-action stars into the world of Minecraft has made it look like a college project with too much green screen. It’s giving ‘Blue’s Clues does Minecraft.’

I hate to moan - actually I don’t really, I bloody love Minecraft with my whole heart - but I’d love to see what the plans looked like at Warner Bros. I’m intrigued by how the storyboards developed and what conversations were had with Microsoft and Mojang. The companies surely didn’t see this kind of reaction from the community, where the trailer on YouTube currently has comments like, “Borderlands: ‘We have the worst movie adaptation ever.’ Minecraft: ‘Hold my beer’”, and, “I’m currently writing an emotional letter of apology to Minecraft Story Mode. Forgive me.”

It’s easy to say things aren’t going well. This should have been an easy task. It should be like printing money. While not everyone was enamoured with the Super Mario Bros Movie, choosing to focus on an animated project worked so well because the Mushroom Kingdom is bright, colourful, cartoony, and aesthetically pleasing, much like Minecraft. This is the formula that would have gone over well for Minecraft - you can keep the Piglin menace, keep the humour, and keep the actor's voices.

The thing is, the animation in the trailer is so close. Yes, some of the designs don’t land, but it could work without the live-action cast and just 90 minutes of amusing story about being lost in the world.

To give you a sense of how this is going over with fans of the game, you just need a visit to r/Minecraft, it is currently filled with posts from players expressing their disappointment. The feedback ranges from incensed rage to humorous asides about the quality of the effects or jokes like, “Why does Aquaman have the Tesseract?”

It’s highly unlikely that Warner Bros. walks this back like we saw for the Sonic the Hedgehog film, so we’re probably looking at something nearing the final product. Am I still going to watch it? Of course, I’d like to be proved wrong and find that the final product is a far leap from this trailer. But from what I’ve seen here, it feels like a Hollywood butchering of a beloved franchise that might appeal to kids but could put off a huge portion of the fanbase who grew up playing, or families that have spent hundreds of hours building projects and exploring over the years.