Review – Warcraft

I placed Warcraft at number two on my Potential Surprises list when looking at summer movies.  The film had a lot of potential.  Duncan Jones is an excellent director, having made one of the best science fiction films in the last decade with Moon (2009) and the incredibly inventive Source Code (2011).  He was finally given a big budget and it was exciting to see what he could do with that.  The visuals for the films looked spectacular and the movie actually looked fun.

After seeing Warcraft, it isn’t the surprise smash I was hoping it was going to be, but it is still pretty entertaining, though not without a lot of flaws.

Warcraft brings us into the world of Azeroth, a peaceful land that is on the brink of war when it is taken over by fearsome orcs, who have left their dying land to colonize on another.  In order to stop them, the King of Azeroth (Dominic Cooper), along with his number one warrior, Anduin (Travis Fimmel) and a young sorcerer, Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer), must bring the kingdom together to defeat the orcs.

For the first half hour of the movie, I was really confused.  With no knowledge of Warcraft and the combination of characters I couldn’t really understand along with poor exposition, I had trouble understanding what in the world was going on.  It was an uphill battle for the film, as I almost stopped caring about the movie entirely nearly twenty minutes in.  But, as the movie went on, the plot made a lot more sense, which made the movie a lot more enjoyable.  The basic plot of the movie is something we have seen a million times, as some of the orcs decide to turn against their fellow orcs and fight with the humans to save Azeroth, and it kind of works for the film.  In a world unknown to a lot of people, using a basic plot device helps people, like myself, learn about this world easier.  It’s basically cinema for dummies.

One of the biggest flaws of the film is the characters.  There wasn’t one that I remotely cared about.  This might have been caused because there are so many characters and they weren’t balanced properly, but that’s not a good excuse.  A good amount of major characters die and when they did, I thought to myself, “Oh.  Well, that sucks.”  I was never surprised or emotional or anything.

The performances in this movie are mediocre at best.  Fimmel is okay playing the Prince Charming warrior-esque character.  Cooper did his research of every boring King in any movie and nailed it.  Ben Foster plays an all-knowing sorcerer and he hams it up like a champ.  Schnetzer isn’t very good either, and that’s a shame, because he gave a really impressive performance in a film called Goat that I saw at Sundance this year.  And why in the world is Paula Patton still acting?  She’s horrible in every movie and playing a half orc-half human here, she’s just the worst.

The best parts of Warcraft are the visuals and the action.  This movie is stunning to look at, especially in 3-D IMAX.  Because this is such a new world, everything is unique and new and I really enjoyed just looking at it.  The orcs looked incredibly realistic too, which shows how far motion capture has come.  The action is crazy and incredibly violent for a PG-13 movie.  People and orcs are getting crushed, and stabbed, and decapitated by the dozens and it is very exciting and brutal.  Duncan Jones knew this movie was massive in scale and knew the fights needed to be just as big.

Warcraft isn’t a good movie or a bad movie.  It’s a middle of the road movie, but one that needs sequels so that the world and story can be fully fleshed out.  The plot takes a while to get going and the characters and acting aren’t very good, but the visuals and action are more than enough to satisfy people who know nothing about Warcraft.  This is one of the most introductory intro movies I have ever seen and it is a world I definitely want to see more of.

MY RATING – 2.5/4

Did you see Warcraft?  What did you think?  Comment below or hit me up on Twitter @kevflix or on Facebook at Kevflix.