There are only a couple things that are always true in the movie world… Comedy sequels are never as good as the original, The Rock will make any movie better, and movies based on video games are always shit.
Warcraft is a movie based on the fantasy video game World of Warcraft. The lore in this world is expansive and very confusing but I will do my best to sum it up. The Orc world is dying and they are looking to move to new lands before their race goes extinct. Using a magic portal they send a war group to conquer the new land and capture the inhabitants there to use as a sacrifice. This human sacrifice opens the portal and let the rest of the Orcs through. From that point the story splits and follows a human warrior working to protect his world from the intruders, and an Orc chief trying to get his family and horde to a new land so they can survive.
This movie gets bogged down by bad storytelling, but does have some positive things to talk about. The first of which is the CGI effects used for the Orcs. Although I felt like the CGI was inconsistent and looked much better when there were no humans on screen, the close up shots of the Orcs as well as the wolves they rode looked very realistic. This really brought me into the movie and helped me relate to the main character’s struggles. This world and its stories are also rich, it is clearly based off of a solid lore, even if it doesn’t always play out on screen.
Ultimately this movie’s pacing is what ruined it for me. The story gets bogged down by a love story that in the end is both unnecessary and unbelievable; but it speeds past important information that left me confused. Warcraft felt like they wanted to shove hundreds of hours of gameplay into a 2 hour film; and because of that the rely on choppy dialog to explain plot points people may have missed if they are not familiar with the game. The humans are by far the weakest characters in this film, and they end up being more unbelievable then the Orcs.
In the end Warcraft felt very messy and although the concept was solid it didn’t focus on the right elements. If they cut out the romance, the father son storyline, and added more action scenes this could have been a solid start to a promising franchise! Fans that are familiar with the characters and familiar with this world will probably enjoy it but this movie is overall sloppy, boring, and underdeveloped.
Warcraft’s Buff Bros Rating: 1 Magic the Gathering Card out of 5