March 28, 2024

Warcraft Movie: That’s No ‘Moon’

Hollywood is riddled with failed attempts to turn a video game franchise into a successful movie. If any game can buck the sad trend of film gems like Super Mario Bros., the Warcraft franchise with its incredibly rich lore is that game.

Below is my lengthy review of how well (or not) the Warcraft movie succeeded in that effort, spoiler free, with no more information about the plot (and no surprise elements) than can be found in the trailers or commercials.

Warcraft movie
Robert Kazinsky (Orgrim), left, and director Duncan Jones in Boston for PAX East.

Warcraft is directed by the brilliant Duncan Jones. This is his first blockbuster film, with a reported budget of $160 million. Jones is best known as an auteur, writing and directing such smaller science fiction films as Moon and Source Code. And he pulls double duty on Warcraft as well, writing it with Charles Leavitt (Blood Diamond, Seventh Son) and Blizzard Entertainment’s Senior Vice-President of Story and Franchise Development, Chris Metzen.

With Metzen on board, it makes sense that the story follows fairly closely the lore from the Warcraft games that tells how the orcs and the Horde first came to Azeroth from their dying world of Draenor and their initial conflict with the humans and the Alliance.

The mostly solid cast includes Travis Fimmel (Vikings) as Sir Anduin Lothar, Toby Kebbel (RocknRolla, Fantastic Four) as Durotan, Dominic Cooper (Preacher, MCU’s young Howard Stark) as King Llane Wrynn, Daniel Wu (Into the Badlands) as Gul’dan, Ben Foster (X-Men: The Last Stand, Pandorum) as Medivh, and Robert Kazinsky (Pacific Rim, True Blood) as Orgrim Doomhammer. With the exception of Paula Patton (Baggage Claim, About Last Night) as Garona, the non-human characters are almost all CGI, over the motion capture work of the actors. So the 6’ tall and pretty buff Kazinsky on screen becomes the much taller and ridiculously muscled Orgrim (dem orc gains).

But in the face of these actors with deep experience delivering the often inherently silly lines of nerd movies, we have Ben Schnetzer (The Book Thief, Punk’s Dead: SLC Punk 2), who plays the young human mage Khadgar — a pivotal role in the film. He had some of the poorest lines of dialogue in the movie, and delivered them with such CW-inspired flatness that he often evoked howls of laughter from the audience. And not the jaded members of the press, but the fans who had done whatever they had to in order to get into the advanced screening. Simply put, he stood out like a murloc in Ironforge.

In fact, the most human and moving acting jobs in this movie came from Kebbel and Kazinsky — two characters we see only as CGI war monsters. Their portrayal of the troubled but deep comradeship between Durotan and Orgrim is the one element that actually seems like it comes from a Duncan Jones movie. Otherwise, aside from Fimmel doing a less crazy version of Ragnar Lothbrok as Anduin Lothar (does he have a contract that stipulates all his characters will have “Loth” in the name?) the rest of the humans are pretty wooden. If you want to see Cooper and Ruth Negga who plays his queen, really knock it out of the park, watch Preacher on AMC Sunday nights.

I expected so much better from Jones. His movies Moon and Source Code are all about character growth and having the audience follow along in the path that leads both to character awareness and plot resolution. There is hardly a single piece of character motivation in this movie that is developed past a declaration of identity, history or intent.

The plot is one of the few highlights of Warcraft, but that’s because it is pretty much straight from game lore. Unfortunately the plot gets stretched over the need to provide as much fanservice as possible, so the movie almost seems like an Azeroth travelogue at times. It’s as though the producers insisted that as many places as possible from the game get used as story locations. That meant almost none of them had the majesty or even touristy interest they should have — like the first viewing of Rivendell in Fellowship of the Ring, for example. It was more like European Vacation — “Look kids, there’s Big Ben, Ironforge.”

That plot unfortunately only wraps up enough to tell you that there will definitely be a sequel. And that is another problem with the movie — it is so blatantly obvious that it is the first in a franchise that a good half of it is setup for the next movies and not a coherent movie that stands alone. It shares that problem with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which, with all of its horrible Abrams-class logic and science problems, is still a better movie overall.

Don’t get me wrong — there are so many Easter Eggs, location and character references and general Warcraft franchise goodies in this movie that any true fan of those games will undoubtedly love it. I haven’t played World of Warcraft in probably eight years, but I still got a thrill out of some of those fun reveals. Sadly, that wasn’t enough to make up for the disappointment I felt at seeing one of my favorite filmmakers stumble so badly outside of his comfort zone.

If you are a true fan of Warcraft games, go see the movie and cheer at the griffins, laugh at the murlocs and soak in the glory of the gigantic pauldrons. But if you expect a good movie in your fandom thrills, you will be disappointed.

Warcraft (PG-13 – Universal, Legendary, Blizzard): 2.5 stars

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