Warcraft

Image credit: Vudu

There are one thousand and one dangers attached to the idea of turning a videogame into a movie. While the idea itself is cool, modern, and fresh with the potential for a large viewership, half the time the films themselves suffer from bad writing, being exclusive to audiences unfamiliar with the game, and making a mockery of genre film –amongst other things. Last night I sat down and watched a film that managed to achieve all of these feats.

Warcraft is a prequel slash origin film that chronicles an on-going war between humans and orcs. After an orc world is destroyed, the various clans of orcs band together under the leadership of one with evil magic powers to travel into a new world and conquer it for their own. It just so happens that Azeroth is already peopled with nations of humans, elves, and dwarves, who have lived in peace for centuries. As war for survival looms nearer a King, a mage, a she-orc, and a warrior must work fast to save the world from the incoming Horde that plans to destroy it.

The biggest problem for this movie was the writing. It felt as if everyone was excited about the idea of writing a Warcraft movie, but then after writing only a few scenes discovered that it really wasn’t going to work. The film is set against long-winded information dumps –which I can appreciate- but as a result it goes in the completely opposite direction and doesn’t let the viewers know anything about what is happening and why, let alone who all the characters are. It became a complete fan-service movie: the obvious thinking behind it being, “don’t worry the people who go to see it will know the game”. For the audience members who have not played the game, or know the story, or were dragged along to the film by their partners, it’s a completely incomprehensible mess that inspires absolutely no interest.

Obviously everyone who read the script knew that it was a dud and therefore decided against trying to make it anything less. The performances are beyond lackluster –corpses make more interesting show- and there was absolutely no chemistry between anyone, which made all the dramatic relationships non-existent and punished the script further by eradicating any love or sentiment that was in there.

Image credit: CNET

And then there was the problem of the action-fantasy aesthetic. We all know that this can be breathtaking when done well, but there is such a thing as bad fantasy and this movie was an absolute boss in crimes against the genre. Every single cliché is adhered to so much that I think it gave me acid reflux! A lot of scenes, styles, and ideas were borrowed from Lord of the Rings and made an absolute mockery of becoming predictable, annoying, and at times downright pointless. And then there was the CGI. Now I will give kudos to the computer wizards who tried with this movie. I can appreciate that the animation of the orcs was deliberately made obvious and stark in contrast to the location and live actors to remind people that it’s a videogame. But it really didn’t work. It was oversaturated and annoying to begin with and once humans and orcs were interacting it just become non-existent.

I never like tearing a movie to shreds and having nothing nice to say about it, but with some films there’s no escaping it. Warcraft was just one of those films.

Starring: Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Ben Foster, Dominic Cooper, Toby Kebbell, Ben Schnetzer, Robert Kazinsky, Clancy Brown, Daniel Wu, Ruth Negga, Anna Galvin, and Glenn Close