Directed by: Duncan Jones
Written by: Duncan Jones, Charles Leavitt
Starring: Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Ben Foster
I figured I'd get this one out of the way since I intend to watch Assassin's Creed (2016) tomorrow, and with both being based on video games I figured their was a tangential connection.
I wanted to like this movie, I really did. I've long been a fan of the Warcraft video game series and I do like Duncan Jones' previous work, Moon (2009) and Source Code (2011), so I was hoping that the film would at least be enjoyable, but like every other video game movie before it, the makers of Warcraft don't seem to realise that you can't take a video game with a 10 or even 20-hour story and translate it in to a movie with a running time of 2 hours. The film is a barrage of visuals and exposition, and while the film is pleasing to the eye, the entire plot is bloated with an absurd amount of content for a film, most of which only goes half-explained.
*Warning: Spoilers Ahead*
I'll first talk about the things I appreciated about the film, because while it was pretty bad, it wasn't irredeemable. The aesthetic of the film is pretty great; any time that the film makes copious use of CGI, the fantastical look of Warcraft really shines, especially in whimsical places only found in fantasy such as the magical city of Dalaran or the Orcish home of Draenor.
The Orcs themselves are also very well done, and their conflict is easily the best thing about the film. Their design is incredibly detailed, from the differences in tusks between individual orcs to their use of different animal skins and skulls for armour really carve out visual identities for all of the important Orcs. The Orc characters are also the only ones to get any of what little character development there is, and their CGI performances are far more convincing and natural than those of the human characters. What's more is they actually have an interesting story behind them; evil Fel Magic that drains people of life has torn their world apart, but it is the harnessing of this magic that allows them to travel to a new world. If the whole film had just been about a civil war between Orcs as they struggle with the morality of using the lives of others for the survival of their race, you might actually have a good movie on your hands.
Unfortunately, the Orcs in the movie have to share their screen time with humans. There was nothing about the human side of the story that worked for me. Their story was just as convoluted as the Orcs' but the movie spends even less time on it; the film does so little with the characters that it seemed the only reason for them being there was because the game had humans too. The acting is stiff and unconvincing from everyone involved, especially Travis Fimmel as Anduin Lothar. I have never seen this man act other than in this film, so I have no idea if he is a good actor outside of this film, but he gives a truly terrible performance here. Maybe it's not any worse than any of the others, maybe it just feels worse because he gets more screentime as the main human character, but every line from him felt under-delivered or forced or just plain off. It's not entirely his fault, the dialogue didn't exactly give him much to work with, but I remember being seriously frustrated with the film in one scene shortly after his son dies.
We find him lying on a bar amidst barrels of some kind of alcohol, clearly drunk and trying to ease the pain of the loss of his son, and as Garona (Patton) comes to comfort him, he utters the line "In my entire life... I've never felt as much pain as I do now." It's supposed to be this heavily emotional moment for him, but it's falls completely flat because we've had so little of either him or his son or their relationship developed, what he says is pointless because we can already infer from what we are watching that that is how he feels, and he delivers it with no amount convincing emotion. So in this scene we have a failure in the storytelling, a failure in the dialogue, and a failure in the acting. In addition to all that, the death of the son and this scene have several short scenes involving barrages of exposition between them, so when the moment comes it feels off because so much of the story has been forced forward, leaving this scene to play catch-up, so we also have a failure in pacing. Now that I think about it, this scene seems to encapsulate everything that was wrong with the film.
In short, humans bad, orcs good, movie not so good.
The Verdict: Warcraft isn't something I recommend; perhaps fans of the video games will get some joy out of seeing locations from the video games brought to life, or spotting the numerous Easter Eggs peppered about the film, but otherwise it's not really worth the time.
Rating: 4.5/10
Published December 28th, 2016
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