Thanks to my friends over at Comcast's Universal Studios (fuck you Comcast), I was able to get into an early screening of Warcraft, the highly anticipated blockbuster that brings the wildly popular computer role-playing game to life in what I'm certain will be the first of several installments. Full disclosure: I have never played the game, nor do I have any knowledge of its mythology. I had no preconceived notions of what I would or "should" see or who any of the characters are, nor had I read any reviews. I did know that fans of the game have been eagerly awaiting this release since it was first announced wayyy back in 2006. Such a long production time usually makes people nervous about the quality of the finished product, and I have to be honest: movies like this are the reason why.
Being a blank slate may be an asset to reviewing the film impartially, but it was certainly NOT an asset to actually understanding what I was watching. The plot follows the early interactions between orcs and humans in the World of Warcraft, alternating perspectives from scene to scene. This choice made it tough to tell who to root for, and it also made the whole thing feel very choppy; from one scene to the next, I had no idea where we would be going or who would be on screen. Maybe this wouldn't have been such an issue if I had an understanding of how various cities and places related to one another, but as a neophyte I was frequently lost. The opening chapter of a series like this needs to do a lot of exposition and world building, a difficult task that Warcraft completely failed at. I left the theater with far more questions about key plot elements than answers, and the questions were not the kind that would drive me to spend more money to find the answers.
Without a clear protagonist identified in the script, it was on the cast to establish who these characters were and how to feel about them. Unfortunately, most of the actors in this movie are either incapable of displaying emotion, or didn't care enough to try. Travis Fimmel (Anduin Lothar) was particularly awful, failing to produce a single facial expression in the entire 2 hour run time. Ben Schnetzer played Khandar, a young rapscallion of a mage who forms a sort of buddy cop duo with Anduin. Schnetzer was going for comic relief, but I found him far more annoying than funny. His goofiness was awkward and kind of half-assed, although to be fair he didn't have much chance with Fimmel doing his best schizophrenic flat affect impression. Ben Foster completely mailed in his performance as Medivh, a character whose role, actions and motivations made no sense to me. Dominic Cooper and Ruth Negga were actually solid as King Llane Wrynn and his wife Lady Taria, but they didn't get nearly enough screen time to make up for the sloppy bullshit the rest of the cast put forth. Meanwhile, on the orcs side of things, there were some solid performances. However, they were mostly overshadowed for me by the fact that all the orcs looked basically the same, which made it tough to keep straight who was who and what was going on. Because the acting in this film was so God-awful, I found that I didn't care about any of the characters, and was disinvested in the entire enterprise.
But let's be honest here; the appeal of a film like this is not its complex characters or enrapturing plot; its the action and epic visuals of a mythical world where fantastic beasts smash each other. Visually, Warcraft did not disappoint. The 3D experience was actually really cool, and didn't have the gimmicky feel of some other 3D movies I've seen. The CGI was excellent, which is absolutely critical when so much of the film is computer generated. The settings looked fantastic, but honored the fantasy nature of the source material. The action was pretty cool, featuring orcs breaking people and epic armies colliding. The best thing the film did was its portrayal of magic, which usually looks terrible in films but here looks really cool, aided by the 3D. I do have one complaint about how this film looked, however: the changing size of the orcs. I couldn't tell exactly what size they were supposed to be. There were POV shots from an orcs perspective that looked down on humans from a high angle, indicating that the orc was a 10 foot tall giant. But then there were other shots that had both humans and orcs in the frame, which made orcs seem like they were the same height as humans but just massively more muscular. In one sequence, an orc picks a horse up and uses it as a projectile weapon, only to ride a different horse about 10 seconds later. What size are these things supposed to be? While it may be a minor detail, it distracted me throughout the entire show.
Overall, I found this film confusing and disinteresting. I have been referring to characters by name in this review, but honestly I had to Google them because I could only name one or two on the way out of the theater. I didn't care about anyone, and I didn't understand a lot of the key parts of the world and the groups that inhabit it. I'm not going to spoil the ending, but I will say that it is abundantly clear that there will be sequel(s) to this garbage fire. Considering the modest budget of $160 million and the built in fan base, I expect that it will be very profitable for Universal. If you know the mythology of World of Warcraft, this movie may be awesome for you. But if not, I would give it a pass.
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