And make Jason Momoa look less demented.
Despite the irrefutable fact that nearly every parent is going to be dragged to see it by their hyperactive spawn, filling up Warner Bros’ coffers until they overflow, A Minecraft Movie looks… not quite right. And not just because Jason Momoa looks like he’s coming down from a week-long bender where he robbed Dora the Explorer.
Like, sure, it’s obviously Minecraft. The trailer’s got creepers, blocky critters and cubes everywhere—all the things you’d expect from the game. But it looks more like an expensive SNL skit (albeit not nearly as good as the Mario Kart one) rather than a tease for an official movie. It’s largely just a lot of green screen and famous faces. Yeah, the same can be said for most blockbusters, but it just has the air of an unofficial adaptation, making nods to the source material without committing.
Naturally, this has inspired plenty of animators and fans to rectify the situation by creating shot-for-shot remakes of the trailer either in Minecraft itself or at least using Minecraft assets and aesthetics. The results, in some cases, actually end up looking more like an official Minecraft Movie trailer than the one that inspired them.
There are lots of them, but Alumio’s remake is the most eye-catching of the bunch, perfectly recreating the trailer in a style that is 100% Minecraft, but with lots of polish and flashiness.
What this trailer does highlight, though, is how those inexpressive Minecraft faces are terrible for an animated feature. Minecraft: Story Mode, the episodic adventure game featuring the voice talents of Patton Oswalt and Catherine Taber, gave us characters who were more animated but still not very expressive, and I dunno if I’d want to sit through a whole movie where the cast struggles to emote at even the most basic level.
QdAndy’s take on the trailer makes the cast significantly more animated, but this ultimately makes them look less like Minecraft characters—when the trailer focuses on them, some of the authenticity is lost. It’s a hard issue to resolve, and maybe goes a long way to explain why Warner Bros decided to go down the live action route. It’s still an impressive effort, though.
I’m rather partial to Cacticrown’s trailer simply because it’s made in-game rather than being an animation that apes the game’s look. It’s pure Minecraft. It’s missing some elements from the official trailer, though. There hasn’t been any attempt to make the blocky adventurers match their silver screen counterparts, for instance, and Jack Black’s Steve isn’t surrounded by fire during his cheesy introduction, but it’s a sterling effort from someone who says they’re new to making Minecraft videos.
Unsurprisingly, a common theme in the comments is that this is what Warner Bros should have given us, instead of making a live action/animation Frankenstein, and that these amateur efforts look so much better. I’m hard pressed to disagree, but we were never going to get a Minecraft film that looked like a 1:1 recreation of Minecraft.
Warner Bros isn’t going to risk diluting the star power of someone like Momoa by making him look like a walking amalgamation of cubes. It’s not the same as Chris Pratt playing Mario or Ben Schwartz playing Sonic—these are already iconic characters who have been around for decades. You can argue that Steve, at least, is a known quantity, unlike Momoa’s character, but I think any attempt to match Minecraft perfectly would bump up against the fact that Minecraft’s aesthetic is kinda hideous, and what works well in a game doesn’t necessarily work well in a movie.
And, like I said at the top, none of this really matters because the kids are gonna go nuts for this nonsense. You might think your little ‘uns have exceptional taste, but you’re wrong. They’ll lap it up because it looks just enough like Minecraft to pass. And c’mon, no adult Minecraft fans were going to enjoy any version of A Minecraft Movie. You play the game to build cool shit, and who wants to see a bunch of movie stars painstakingly recreate a Star Destroyer or make some elaborate redstone contraption for two hours?
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