The first teaser for A Minecraft Movie dropped this week, and like a fist smashing a tree to smithereens, it instantly destroyed my expectations that the movie could be good. It looks like lowest common denominator kids movie bullsh*t, it clearly makes heavy use of green screens, and the llama’s are so funny dude humor seems about ten years past its sell-by date.
From Napoleon Dynamite To A Minecraft Movie
I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, a big Minecraft guy. I dip into the game every other year to spend a few weeks building stuff, but that’s the extent of it. I am, however, a big fan of director Jared Hess’ early work. Hess isn’t a household name, but if you’re anywhere in the age range of 25 to 40, you’ve probably seen at least one of his movies, most of which are co-written by his wife, Jerusha Hess.
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Hess’ debut, Napoleon Dynamite, was a massive cult hit, and his follow-up Nacho Libre was similarly beloved. It’s understandable if you assumed he dropped off the map after these movies, as I don’t know anyone who’s seen Gentleman Broncos, and Don Verdean and Masterminds both flopped. This year, though, he returned to the director’s chair for the first time in eight years with the Netflix animated movie Thelma the Unicorn. Despite a rocky career, he’s managed to clinch Minecraft, which is as big as video game properties get. Regardless of quality, it will likely make a ton of money. Unlike Borderlands, Minecraft is too big to fail. The generation that grew up playing it will show up.
Fish Out Of Water, All Over Again
It’s just a bummer that Hess’ big commercial break, like many video game adaptations before it, is taking a fish-out-of-water (or isekai, for the anime fans) narrative approach. Sonic the Hedgehog used the same set-up, with Sonic being spirited away from his video game-y planet to a live-action Green Hills, Montana. The Super Mario Bros. Movie took the same approach, though in the opposite direction, sending Mario and Luigi from Brooklyn to the Mushroom Kingdom. The original Super Mario Bros. movie did it, too, with the brothers plumber heading from real-world NYC to Dinohattan.
In 2020’s Monster Hunter movie, Earth soldiers were pulled through a portal into the New World, where they brought modern military might to bear on some of the series’ iconic monsters. The later Jumanji movies aren’t adaptations of an actual video game, but they are movies about video games, and both use the same trope, with Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, and Karen Gillan getting sucked into a jungle-set game.
Isekai Isn’t The Only Way For Video Game Adaptations
Obviously, there are plenty of other video game adaptations that take a different route. The Last of Us straightforwardly adapted the first game, and though Fallout was technically a fish-out-of-water tale, it used the trope in the same way the games always have, with a Vault Dweller setting out into the scorched world above.
Likewise, Uncharted, The Witcher, Pokemon Detective Pikachu, Tomb Raider, Ratchet & Clank, and Borderlands all stayed close to the source material. Tetris, Gran Turismo, and Dumb Money adapt real-world video game-related stories, while Ready Player One and Free Guy are about invented video games. There are many ways to skin this cat, so why are so many movies using the same tired method?
This subset of game movies (often some of the most popular) continue to return to the isekai approach. It’s bizarrely common, but it makes sense if you think about our relationship to video games and how the isekai trope mirrors it. When we start an unfamiliar game, we have a similar experience, learning how this new world works, how it differs from other games we’ve played, and from our own. The rules we expect to apply may not. You might expect Frogger, being a frog and all, to be able to swim. Frogger drowns, sorry. You might have tried to cut down a tree to make a bridge in the original Zelda, but your attempts were for naught until Breath of the Wild. A game’s tutorial is the process by which we get our sea legs for a new world.
From that perspective, it makes sense that A Minecraft Movie, and all those other video game flicks, have taken the fish-out-of-water approach. But if filmmakers keep using it, it will have the opposite of the desired effect. Instead of making their worlds seem strange, it will render them all too familiar.
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