Before watching Warcraft my expectations of this film weren’t very high. The couple of pictures I saw of it didn’t really make it look appealing and as it is also based on a game chances were big that it wasn’t good. Gamemovies in general aren´t known for quality and the genre hasn´t delivered a film which managed to surprise (in a positive way). Still, looking at the director, I had some hope. Duncan Jones has been responsible for the impressive Moon, so he might be able to deliver a quality film.
Azeroth has been a world of peace for years. The guardian (Ben Forster), whose job it is to protect everyone, hasn’t been seen for years. Everything changes though when a portal to another world opens and a big horde of Orcs come through it, imprisoning people in order to use their energy to open the portal once again in order for the rest of the Orcs to come through. Their world is slowly dying and they need a new place to live. The dark magic substance called Fel plays an important role in it, which changes everyone who comes into contact with it.
Even though I have played the first two Warcraft RTS games I had some experience with its world, but I never invested time into playing World of Warcraft. It is that last game on which the movie is based and without any knowledge about it I wasn’t sure if it would manage to tell a story which would also pull non-gamers this new rold. The opening of the movie impresses, when Orc Durothan (Toby Kebbell) and his pregnant wife are introduced. These CGI-characters are very impressive and the emotions they express feel real, immediately making you care about them. Unfortunately not enough time is spent on the introduction of other characters, making it difficult to really care when various events take place.
The comparison with the Lord of the Rings movies of course is inevitable and this film doesn’t manage to reach the same level. If some more time had been spent on introducing the worlds and their characters and increasing the running time to about three hours it would’ve probably resulted in a more believable world. It tries to do too much in too little time. As there are so many characters, on both Orc and human side it is difficult to give them depth. It might have been better to take the Marvel approach and slowly work towards this movie when they finally meet.
Fans of the game will probably enjoy Warcraft a lot more because of their knowledge of the world (it has small references to the game), but for the average cinemagoer this will mostly feel like a weak Lord of the Rings clone which offers both action and humour, but doesn’t have a big enough emotional core to make you care about its characters and what they are trying to accomplish.
