The Warcraft movie is mainly aimed at fans of the associated games. But can a relatively uninformed fantasy fan still have fun in the cinema?
I didn’t care much about the big Warcraft movie until recently. I was never a big fan of World of Warcraft before the Legion beta and while I had enjoyed playing the strategy games, that was quite a while ago and I only had a rudimentary idea of the whole backstory. But then I was supposed to make a collection of all press reviews for the Warcraft movie and got curious. So I actually went to the premiere of the film at midnight on the same day – but without rose-colored Warcraft fan glasses!
No Uwe Boll film!
Let’s get one thing straight: The Warcraft movie isn’t a license turkey like the ones Uwe Boll tends to make. Rather, they found a real Warcraft enthusiast in director Duncan Jones, who was wholeheartedly involved in the project. Therefore, the film is packed with details that even a relative Warcraft noob like me can notice, such as the typical leather-covered Orc buildings or the bulky armor of the human foot soldiers.
Yuck, fur in the soup!
However, the strict adherence to the source material also serves as the main criticism of the film. It races through the plot at a breakneck pace, which can only be understood if you’re well-acquainted with the Warcraft lore. Because only then do you understand who exactly this Medivh is and why he is so important for Azeroth as a Guardian. This is never explained in the film.
Or what is up with the “Fel”? Without prior knowledge, it’s just some weird green stuff that seems “evil”. And whoever had the brilliant idea to continue referring to it as “Fel(l)” in the German version should really be punished, in my opinion. Sorry, but it just sounds incredibly silly and ruins the mood when someone seriously whispers, “He was touched by the ‘Fel(l)’, he is lost.” Acute case of pet hair allergy, or what?
Too much of a good thing
Overall, the entire film screams, “Give me more time.” Because the complex Warcraft world with its factions, races, and kingdoms is simply too intricate to be touched on lightly or thrown into the picture. With an additional hour of runtime and a slightly slower narrative pace, it would have been certainly doable with a little effort.
Once again, The Lord of the Rings has to be mentioned as a comparison, because just because that film took its time to build the world and the plot back then, an uninformed viewer could also follow the story and get lost in it. Unfortunately, Warcraft: The Beginning only succeeds in this regard for hardcore fans.
For the Horde!
However, what the film lacks in narrative build-up, it triples back in visual power! Because even though the trailers looked somewhat cheap, everything looks amazing in the final version on the big screen! And here, especially the Orcs are the real heroes of the film, as the CGI masks of the Orc actors are extremely well done, and the lumbering giants have surprisingly expressive facial expressions. The last time I saw something like this was in Avatar, which similarly presented the Na’vi aliens impressively.
Therefore, the Orc characters like Durotan, Orgrim, and Gul’dan are much more impressive than their human counterparts. The only ones who really stand out are Lothar as the cool badass knight and the tough half-orc Garona; the rest remain rather pale and uninteresting.
Brutal action!
The battle scenes are wonderfully executed and brutally staged. Here too, the Orcs show where the war hammer hangs, and you really feel sorry for the poor humans who rarely stand a chance against such muscular giants.
It gets even more epic when the Orcs are polishing each other’s green or brown snouts, as the cinema hall shakes with primal force. And that’s how you want to see Warcraft. As a battle epic full of visual power.
Exactly that was done very well by the film. But if the director had only taken a little more time to build up the world and the characters well, Warcraft: The Beginning could have become a really good movie. Instead, it sadly turned out to be “just” an epic fan film.
This was the criticism from Jürgen, a non-WoW fan regarding the film. You can read our fan criticism from WoW expert Cortyn here:
