the fact that the minecraft movie -- sorry, a minecraft movie -- completely misinterprets what minecraft is even about and so many people are still eating it up annoys me so damn much.
i mean, also the fact that every single aspect of the whole film is trash and yet people are still eating it up also annoys me. but i really wanna focus on how the plot completely misinterprets everything minecraft is actually about.
the movie isn't even out yet, but i could already see it the moment the leak about the piglin leader who hates creativity got out. and with the recent trailer, it's all the more obvious. a minecraft movie doesn't know what minecraft is even about.
and like, it's understandable. mojang has shown with their recent directionless updates that not even they're sure what minecraft is about anymore. but even they somehow have a better idea than whoever's writing the minecraft movie.
technically speaking, it's not a retcon. but it sure as hell feels like a retcon. the movie is trying to make out as if the entire game is purely about creativity, down to saying "creativity is key to survival". except it's literally not though, the creative aspects of the game are pretty separate from the survival parts. the game literally has different gamemodes separating the two.
and like, sure you can call survival tips like hiding in a 2 block crevice to avoid endermen 'creativity', but that's being lenient with the definition. and the redstone aspects are very much optional, and even for the contraptions that help with survival, most people just stick with the same few builds everybody knows.
survival and creative are separate modes for a reason. "creativity is key to survival" makes absolutely zero sense in the context of minecraft and i want to give whoever wrote that line a hard slap in the face.
but something so much worse than trying to make minecraft out to be all about creativity is trying to make the nether out to be the antithesis to creativity. which of course makes absolutely zero sense. players can still be very creative in the nether in the game, there's nothing restricting that. and literally nobody ever has played minecraft, entered the nether, and gone "this is the antithesis to creativity". no promotional material has ever made this out to be the case either. nor the subtle lore details. fucking nothing, ever, has ever even vaguely implied this to be the case. how can this be anything other than a giant fucking retcon?
and they make piglin society out to be this evil creativity hating society, and that's like their defining trait in the movie. that they hate creativity. even more of a defining trait than liking gold, which is their defining trait in the actual game. and they invade the overworld because they just hate creativity so much.
minecraft is such a unique fantasy world that you're thrown into with no explanation, and forced to survive in a beautiful blocky world. minecraft is about creativity, but it's also about serenity, and about survival, and about loneliness, and simultaneously about community. it's about the sadness of seeing your pet dog die, and about the beauty of your poorly put together first house, and about the fear in your first enderman encounter, and the wonder of your first trip to the nether. it's about building with friends, and griefing friends' builds, and fighting friends to the death. and it's about so so so much more. somehow, despite its rocky reputation Minecraft Story Mode managed to portray so much of this, while a minecraft movie fails to even portray one.
and yes, a minecraft movie can't even portray one of these things right. it doesn't even get the creativity aspect correct. the sets are bland and uninspired, the houses aren't built within minecraft's creative restrictions and so they look off and un-minecrafty, and the message is portrayed so so blandly.
that's another thing that really bugs me about this retcon: it's boring. it takes a previously ambiguous dimension and pig society that could be so many interesting things, and retcons them into one dimensional antagonists. that's not only ironically a very creatively bankrupt thing for them to do, but also leads to a boringly portrayed message. "creativity is good, the world is about creativity, and these guys hate creativity, so they're the bad guys."
you know what else already did this message? the lego movie. and that did it a billion times better. the message in that has layers, not just to be creative but to not have such a one track mindset, to think outside of how the world says things should be. and it also had a far more believable antagonist. instead of the villain just being 'i hate creativity because i am evil', he was a perfectionist who wanted everything to be exactly how he thinks they should be. this feels more believable because this kind of person is very common to come across when it comes to lego, for them to always want their sets to be perfect with not a single brick out of place. it's just an extreme exaggeration of that kind of lego fanatic.
also, the lego movie did its animation far better too. instead of making everything real life because the idiots up top think only live action movies are real movies, they opted to not only have everything in animated lego, but work within lego's limitations in creative ways to make the animation work. to portray the brushing of hair for example, they simple swap out an unbrushed hair piece for a brushed hair piece. and instead of real water or explosions they use lego pieces. damn, they even use lego pieces for the smear frames. that's going above and beyond. and because of all that, it feels like a love letter to lego.
meanwhile a minecraft movie is not only ugly live action, but can't even put together a single house that looks like it was built in minecraft. that's pathetic. that's absolutely pathetic. it's clear they don't actually give a shit about minecraft's unique visual style.
while i'm at it i also want to complain about the ugly terrain of this movie, where instead of looking anything vaguely like what you'd see in minecraft, they fill it with these uneven cubes making up giant cubes because they want to really exaggerate the gimmick of minecraft being blocky, as if the designers were all dementia ridden grandmas who looked over at their grandchildrens' ipads one time, thought to themselves 'it's all blocky, how quirky,' and then proceeded to make an art piece on it where all they could focus on was how blocky it is, and so it turned out all distorted and inaccurate.
i don't know what i find more outrageous; the fact that they think a mainstream audience will be stupid enough to go see it, or that they're probably right.
jacobvanloon
kianamaiart
kaledo-art
snowghoul
baratheonpilled
titsay
