Film Review: ‘Warcraft’ is An Okay Movie – If You Know Your Lore

Note: this article was also published on SciFi4Me.com.

Warcraft, story and characters by Chris Metzen (based on the MMORPG World of Warcraft); written by Duncan Jones and Charles Leavitt; directed by Duncan Jones. Copyright2016

Hollywood has long been mocked for their attempts at trying to get a movie made based on a video game. Ever since Super Mario Bros. (which is, according to Wikipedia, the first film with an international release ever based on a video game), the movies have – for the most part – been mediocre at best, laughably bad at worst (although I admit I have a ‘guilty pleasure-esque’ fondness for Street Fighter).

So, when I say Warcraft is one of the best movies based on a video game out there, I know that’s ‘damning with faint praise’. There’s not really much of a high bar out there to pass. But one thing that has changed in the past decade is the cost of special effects and CGI, and that’s where Warcraft shines. As a casual player of World of Warcraft (and as someone who’s married to someone who plays it heavily), I am familiar enough with the source material to recognize the various locations we go to in the movie, and the graphics were gorgeous. When we go to Stormwind, we GO to Stormwind. It definitely feels like you are in-game.

Another thing that matters in this case (and the same goes with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within) is that with games that are RPGs, you at least have some story you can work with. The new Angry Birds movie that’s out? There’s an obvious stretch to make the ‘plot’ of the video game work for a movie. However, with Warcraft, you’ve got a franchise of five core games, going all the way back to the real-time strategy Warcraft: Orcs & Humans released in 1994, with most of it now housed in the MMORPG World of Warcraft.

The Warcraft movie is meant to be a bit of an ‘origin’ story of the franchise: but considering the first version of World of Warcraft was released in 2004, and there has been five expansions since then, there’s a lot of condensing and straying from the overall game plot.

The movie starts out in Draenor, home of the orcs. There’s a lot of bad stuff happening there, and the place is basically on limited time. But that’s okay – one of their prophets, Gul’dan, has a plan that involves the use of a magic force called the Fel that looks like a cross between the green sludge you see in movies from the 80s that involve aliens and some sort of cocaine metaphor gone completely off the rails.

He creates a portal and leads the army (for the Horde!) into Azeroth. Filled with your basic humanoid fantasy kingdom residents recognizable to anyone who’s ever played D&D (which, of course, WoW is loosely based on), the residents of Azeroth are completely blindsided by the attacks.

I give this much detail for a reason: the first half of the movie is very well done. With that basic plot, I started getting excited that Blizzard was going to use this to show a mirror of the current Syrian refugee crisis and the debate surrounding immigration, proving that it’s not all black and white (or red and blue, as the case may be).

Alas, the second half does not fulfill the promise of that first half, and becomes entirely way too tropey. We get your standard heroes on both sides, trying to convince their people, falling into the stereotypes well known in RPG games. The female characters, promising at first, end up not being very well rounded. The movie just barely passes the Bechtel-Wallace test, with a romance that seems shoehorned in (because why ELSE would we need to have a female character?). And, of course {spoiler alert}, we have your traditional betrayals and inner circle battles for dominance.

When I complained about some of this to my husband, suggesting a few characters that could have easily been female and not changed the plot, he excused it away – stating that the movie was based on one of the major plot lines in that first World of Warcraft release. In other words, he felt that had they changed it the way I suggested, it would’ve deviated too much from the plot known to him and any of the other gamers who were familiar with the source material. Unfortunately, said plot without that knowledge comes across like every standard fantasy book that has Tolkien’s influence on it. It ends up feeling like a game run by a first-time DM who doesn’t know much better but is trying SO HARD to be original.

Blizzard has at its hands the chance to use their power for good, and they end up telling a fairly predictable and overdone story. Which, if you’re looking for a good popcorn film or if you’re intimately familiar with the WoW universe, means you’ll probably enjoy. It wasn’t bad by any shot. But it could’ve been so much more.

Warcraft opened on June 10 nationally. You can find more information (and get to virtually ride a gryphon through Stormwind) on the Warcraft movie website.