"Warcraft" - Review

For the Initiated Fans Only

Oh, the never ending turmoil that is video game movie adaptations. There have only been a few that have even been close to being good. The first Mortal Kombat and Disney's Prince of Persia (even with the blatantly white-washed Gods of Egypt style cast) come to mind as movies that were almost good. In certain states of mind, if you catch my drift, Mortal Kombat is probably the greatest 90's film ever made right next to Space Jam. Every other video game movie though? Pure trash. Uwe Boll's legendarily dismal filmography is a testament to that. Remember Super Mario Bros.? Wow, that is a train-wreck. Suffice it to say, video game movies have a lot of room for improvement. So, here we are now in 2016 and for some reason Hollywood really really wants to finally get a good video game movie out there. We had Ratchet & Clank which landed with a dull thud. Angry Birds: The Movie was a little bit better, but still incredibly underwhelming despite its decent animation and its stellar voice cast. Next up is what may be the biggest, most expensive adaptation to date based on quite possibly the video game with the most beloved lore: Warcraft. Surely a franchise with lore so vast and detailed can translate to the screen successfully... right? Well... my answer is a mixed one. As a relative stranger to the source material, I cannot speak for how accurately the games have been translated to the screen. What I can voice in on is if it works as a straight up film. Sadly, it does not quite work. Warcraft is an ambitious effort with impressive aesthetics to spare, but because of an incredibly lazy and unfocused script, extremely poor characterization, and some miscasting, it falls into the camp of Mortal Kombat and Prince of Persia as an almost good movie.

Warcraft follows the plight of a large tribe of Orcs who are fleeing their dying world via a magic portal to settle in the peaceful realm of Azeroth. Azeroth is home to many dwarves and elves, but for some reason they are barely in the movie. Instead, we also focus on the humans that rule the majority of the land. These two groups do not play nice however; the orcs being bred for nothing but war and humans being completely untrusting of these giant monsters who show up out of the blue and start killing their people. Sure enough, skirmishes break out. It is up to Durotan of the orc tribe and a bunch of humans and mages, with Anduin Lothar being the cool tough guy of the bunch, to bring peace between their races and stop the... wait for it... warcraft that has broken out in their homes.

I will just say it right off the bat: this script is not good. In fact, I could barely keep track of what was going on. Most of the dialogue coming out of these characters' mouths comes off as gibberish to me. It does not help that the film does close to nothing to establish its characters, which I am sure are fleshed out extensively in the source material. And there we have the rub. In order to appreciate this film, you need to have an extensive knowledge of the video games and be a devoted fan of them. This was not made for outsiders to the material and that is a problem. Another problem is that because it is made exclusively for fans, any enjoyment a fan may have will only be from recognizing elements in the film that they are already familiar with. To illustrate my point, let me put it this way. If a certain important character dies, that fan may see it as a powerful moment because they already know everything about that character and their backstory. For anyone else, that is completely impossible. That character dies, but because they are not established or fleshed out, we do not feel the impact of the moment. To us, it is just a shrug and a "well, that's too bad".

When I say that characters are not fleshed out, that also applies to the world itself. The film starts right off by throwing names and magic at us and showing us numerous very similar worlds to look at. To a fan, this could be absolutely thrilling. To us, it is completely baffling. Once I got used to being lost, I did eventually find some things to enjoy. It is clear that there is vast lore at work here, so it was inherently fascinating to observe. Costumes, weapons, magical spells, etc. are all very detailed and cool to look at. From the limited knowledge of the games I have, I appreciated how the film was able to integrate and adapt the class systems. All of these are the perfect ingredients for a complex and exciting film, which makes it so frustrating that the script itself is so slapped together and lazy. There is a skewed sense of pacing that makes it impossible to follow thematically. For its 2 hour run time, things just sort of happen until the final battle starts. The battle itself is pretty dang cool, but then the movie suddenly ends without a true pay off. It pulls an Amazing Spider-Man 2 by having it end on a sequel baiting cliffhanger that leaves everything completely unresolved. In fact, nothing changes by the end. It is exactly as it started, just with a pile of corpses after all the CGI shenanigans come to a stop.

The CGI shenanigans themselves look great. There is some impressive motion capture with the orcs, so much so that those characters emoted more than their human counterparts. The one character I felt anything for was Durotan. He was well realized and I understood him. Too bad he often disappears from the film for long stretches so we can focus on the dull human characters. These human characters are all exchangeable and boring to be honest and a good number of them are not performed particularly well. Ben Foster as the Guardian was incredibly over the top and silly in contrast to the overt seriousness of the rest of the film. Paula Patton, who plays the sexy human/orc hybrid, was also entirely miscast. She pulls off the look of her character well, but her performance was incredibly shallow and surface-level. It does not help that her character is essentially there to be objectified by the male human characters as she hardly gets anything to do until the final minutes of the film.

As much as I have criticized so far, not everything is so bad in Warcraft. The effects and battles are well staged, thanks to directed Duncan Jones who made the incredibly great films Moon and Source Code. I have seen many giant tent pole films by first time indie directors go off the rails, but Jones does a commendable job keeping this giant production together, which gives me hope for his career future. He adds some stylish flourishes throughout the film that were quite impressive, notably one sequence at the start of the film involving two characters struggling with a portal. The other thing I admired happens to be the thing that frustrates me the most. There are moments in this problematic script that actually took me by surprise because of how bold they were. It is as if they were lifted from a different, far better film. I believe the original source material is to thank for these moments. If the rest of the film around those moments was better and did that source material justice, those moments would have been legitimately affecting.

This is a completely frustrating experience, but not one without its good qualities. I am sure fans will get a kick out of seeing their beloved material onscreen, but the rest of us will just have to settle for some pretty CG effects.

Grade: C-.

Warcraft is now playing in theaters everywhere.