Warcraft (2016)

It's bad.

Zero interest.

Overview: So our story begins with the orcs, who are a proud warrior people blah blah blah. Their world is dying, so the magic-using Gul'dan uses dark magic powered by the sacrifice of their enemies to open a portal to a new world, Azeroth, for them to conquer as their new home. The people living there, mostly the human kingdom of Stormwind, don't take kindly to that, and war happens. Behind the scenes, a very obviously suspicious bad guy works to further the orc invasion and torpedo the human war effort. Meanwhile on the orc side, the noble Frostwolves, led by Durotan, have growing doubts about the orc leadership. Excitement? Ehh...


Notable moments/quotes: The movie is extremely fond of showing us a neat fantasy location and only spending about three minute there. In example, take Dalaran. It's a floating city run by mages. It's very pretty. We see it for about two minutes before we go someplace else. This happens quite a lot.

At one point, Khadgar, a young mage, is investigating the tower of Medivh, the Guardian of Azeroth who is sworn to stop threats to the realm. Khadgar is a former member of the Kirin Tor, the mages who run the sky city. At one point, his Kirin Tor tattoo glows and points him at a particular book. The reason for this is never really explained, nor does his tattoo ever again serve as a kind of magic detector in the movie.

Lothar, a man with no personality, at one point offers Khadgar a hand to help him up. The mage reaches to take it, only for Lothar to pull a classic middle school move and yank his hand back.

Yet another main character, Garona, a half-orc, is held prisoner in Stormwind. The Queen delivers some food for her for no reason beyond her apparent lack of ability to delegate.

Garona also speaks the human language, a fact glossed over with basically "oh yeah I talked with the human prisoners we only started taking weeks ago and that's why I speak Human perfectly."

Just in case anyone missed the fact that Gul'dan is a bad guy, literally every time he's on screen he's draining the life from at least one person to fuel his magic.

My thoughts: Let me first qualify this by explaining my background with this series. I played Warcraft III a fair bit and enjoyed it, and I played World of Warcraft extensively during its first and second expansions; I also dabbled in its fourth expansion. I know something of the background and the much-vaunted "lore" even if I'm not really much of a fan any more. That doesn't mean I hate Warcraft stuff (I paid to see this movie after all), just that I lost interest in the games. So, I like to think that I'm coming into this from a middle-of-the-road perspective.

And dear sweet cross-dressing Thor, this is a mess. Not an Uwe Boll level mess, but a mess.

For one, there are too many main characters. The movie wants to focus on everyone, but ends up mostly focusing on either nobody or the human warrior Lothar.

I liked him better as Ragnar.

And Lothar is terrible. The movie wants us very, very badly to like Lothar, but he has this weird sort-of snarky sort-of terminally depressed disposition that makes even tolerating him difficult. He's given a fair amount of the "funny" moments in the movie, but they either fall flat (him making a threatening gesture at a soldier only for an offscreen mage to turn the soldier into a sheep) or are poorly scripted to begin with (an "Is not/is too" exchange with Garona). Every time he was on-screen, I wanted to punch him in the face. He's bland, dull, and uninteresting. He doesn't even have that much of a personality beyond his weird sad clown thing. And I like this actor! He's a big part of the reason why Vikings is so good, but whether he was miscast here or the script is at fault I find it difficult to say.

The movie also strikes a weird balance between giving too much or not enough background information. Numerous times, I felt like I needed to stop the movie and look up a wiki page on a given character, because they clearly were supposed to be a big deal, yet the movie had given me nothing on who they were or what they were about. Other times, I felt like falling asleep as the movie went on and on for what felt like the hundredth time about, say, Khadgar being THE GUARDIAN who PROTECTS AZEROTH and zzzz.

The movie is basically an unfocused mess. They tried to appeal to newcomers and diehard fans alike, and in my view failed to appeal to either. I'm sure huge Warcraft fans will enjoy seeing some of these characters in a movie, but I feel like most newcomers might come away underwhelmed at best and bitterly disappointed at worst.

However, there were a few things I liked about this movie. First, the effects. The magic looks amazing, whether that's Gul'dan's life-draining Fel magic or Khadgar/Medivh's arcane spells. The orcs, too, look great, and the movie mostly manages to avoid too much uncanny valley. At times, the human actors look less real than some of the CG ones, so detailed is the work the filmmakers have put in to putting this fantasy realm to the screen. And I appreciate that.

Ultimately, this movie failed to impress me. Some of the flashier moments with magic or grand combat work well, but short of old nostalgia tugging on heartstrings for certain characters I remember, the plot and dialogue did little for me. Also Lothar. Lothar is boring, unfunny, and there's barely a scene in this he isn't in.

While this movie isn't terrible, there are better ways to spend your money. I give this movie a Nic Cage Asserts His Identity out of ten. Tell me how wrong I am on Facebook and give me money to keep being wrong on Patreon!