Movie Review: Warcraft

So I just got back from watching the film adaptation of Warcraft and if you don't take into account my fears about what the movie could have been (circa early 1990s), it was about what I expected with a little bit of disappointment thrown in for good measure; but honestly, how could there not be with a video game movie.

Okay enough of that predetermined video game movie bashing.

If you're the kind of person that will read any negativity in my review and retort with, "Well then you're just not a fan of the Warcraft series, so obviously you don't know what you're talking about.  Stupid person." then I recommend you read my first post about my brief history with the franchise that I posted about 10 months ago.  I'm not a n00b in regards to the series, but I am ignorant about the events after Warcraft II and anything that happened in any of the books.

That being said, I did enjoy the movie for what it was.  It was a high fantasy story set in a fictional world where incredible events happened to fictional species.  It was a fun movie and I didn't feel that based on any of the trailers that I watched a movie that wasn't promised.  There were Orcs, Humans, Dwarves, Elves (and their ridiculously long-ass ears; thanks WoW. . .I think), Worgs and Griffens.  What I missed were primarily troops from the Horde side, the Trolls, Ogres and Dragons did not make an appearance, or if they did, they were very well camouflaged in the background.  The point is, the movie looked and felt like a Warcraft movie.

One aspect of the movie that in fact felt too much like a movie set in the Warcraft universe, was that there were a number of times I felt that objects didn't carry as much weight as their size implied.  When Durotan (Not the largest of the Orcs, but warchiefed sized) poked a rather small human by comparison, there was no reaction from the human who might as well have been poked by someone of equal size, weight and density.  I felt like someone human sized being poked by an Orc warchief (apparently between 6'8" and 8'6" and weighing between 226-625lbs), would be akin to being nudged by an adult elk.  There would be some weight with that poke/nudge.

Along the same lines, with the exception of a dagger that the female Half-Orc Garona used, most of the weapons that the Humans used felt like there was very little weight behind them.  Lothar would frequently one-hand his broadsword, which looks like it could weigh well over however how many pounds a broadsword of that size forged from steel would weigh.  I imagine that it would be of similar weight to this sword, which is an appropriate for today's article.  And even in one scene when either Lothar's sword or King Llane's sword was ceremoniously and gently stabbed into the ground, the sword wobbled like it weighed less than 5lbs.  Yeah, I know this is a movie (obviously) and that I can apparently suspend my disbelief about Orcs entering a fictional world through a magical portal while being defended against by a guy riding a Griffen into battle?  It's just something I noticed that bugged me a bit.  Kind of like how it appears that 93.47% of the time people are "drinking" out of empty cups/mugs; the lack of weight just doesn't look right.

One final cosmetic thing, which is actually two things now that I think about it, that I felt kind of "eh" about was the look of both King Llane and the mage Khadgar, and the wear of the costumes.  For Llane, something about him didn't seem very kingly.  Maybe it was his youth, maybe it was his dialogue, or maybe it was just his demeanor, but I never fully bought into him being a King of Stormwind.  For Khadgar, I don't know if I bought that he was a mage, mainly because of his hairstyle, which reminded me of Jeremy Irons from the Dungeons & Dragons film; (Warcraft, by the way, was a far superior film in pretty much every way).  And with the costumes, it boils down to the same complaint I had with the Star Wars prequels, that very few, if any, of the clothes looked lived in.  I mean the costumes themselves looked great, but only if they had just be purchased off the proverbial rack.  I don't know if I would believe that these were clothes that the characters would have had/worn for any more than a few weeks.

One last criticism is that I felt that the movie lacked a fair amount of exposition, especially on the side of Azeroth, for me to believe in the world.  I guess I just felt like there wasn't enough meat there for me to be invested in this world, at least from the start.  By the end, I kind of was.  However, according to IMDb, the director Duncan Jones has 40 minutes of extra movie that he wants to go into an extended cut of the film, which could contain some of that extra exposition.

I will say though that the CGI for the Orcs was damn impressive.  There was enough variance between the various primary Orcs (Doomhammer, Blackhand, Gul'dan, Durotan, Hellscream) that I never questioned which male Orc was talking.  The females, of which there was primariltdimpy one that had a talking role (I noticed at least three others) were interestingly very sexually dimorphic compared to the males, but that just might make sense in the world/universe that they came from.  And speaking of women in speaking roles, I can safely say that Warcraft passes the Bechdel Test as there were at least two scenes where named women talked to each other that didn't involve a man; not great I know, but apparently better than almost 50% of the movies out of Hollywood these decades.  

There were a number of shots that felt very similar to Warcraft I and II, in that they were overhead flyover shots of the Orc camps building and attacking Human settlements.  While these moments were pretty few and far between, the overall aesthetic still felt grounded in the Warcraft universe (even with the very clean aforementioned costumes).

The music was another semi-highlight for me, which during the end credits I found out it was by Ramin Djawadi.  During a couple of cues, I felt like I was listening to a combination of the music from Pacific Rim with the fantasy hints of Game of Thrones.  Granted there weren't any gallant fanfares that I can recall the themes of, which may just mean that I have to listen to the soundtrack again (It might even be a good one for D&D), but the music came across as something very similar in style and thematically to the music that Glenn Stafford composed for the first two games.

Well, that turned out a bit longer than I was anticipating.

In closing, Warcraft isn't Lord of the Rings, or The Hobbit, or even Game of Thrones, but I felt that it did a good job of delivering a high fantasy movie that I could sit back an enjoy while sipping on my 127 oz medium sized Coke/Pibb Xtra soda.  It wasn't a flawless film, but coming from a video game background only minimally versed in Warcraft lore, I don't feel that money was wasted by seeing it in a theatre.  I don't know if I would go so far as to say that I would be pre-ordering the movie when it's released on Blu-ray, but I would be interested to at least find out what the possible 40 extra minutes contains.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

I Paid the Iron Price