Warcraft

I have not played any incarnation of Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft video games, but I played a lot of Army Men. So that was strike one against me going into the former's cinematic rendition, Warcraft. But, no. That says more about the film than me. I think.

Draenor, the home dimension of the brutish Orcs, is doomed. Their evil warlock chieftan Gul'dan (Daniel Wu) discovers another world where they can live in. This realm is Azeroth, home to humans, dwarves, elves, mages, etc. Gul'dan is adept at The Fel, a brand of dark magic which feeds on life force, with which he opens a portal to Azeroth. He and a small band go through and they plan to bring the rest.

Naturally, the Orcs' resettlement plans involve killing and looting. So good King Llane (Dominic Cooper) and his brother-in-law, Sir Lothar (Travis Fimmel), set out to stop them. One Orc, Durotan (Toby Kebbell), doesn't want to make war, so he might help. Another Orc, Garona (Paula Patton), joins the humans' side. The good mage-in-training Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer) also helps. And the Guardian Medivh (Ben Foster) is supposed to be on their side, but really?

Anyone with a working knowledge of Warcraft lore will understand this unquestionably. Everyone else is sure to have a lot of questions. A lot of core concepts aren't given proper exposition. A lot of characters give too much exposition. It's like David Lynch's Dune, but I didn't have a theater-issued pamphlet to give me a rundown on the lore.

The characters themselves are incredibly stiff. Sir Lothar, the sarcastic one, is the only human with a semblance of personality. Durotan, his Orc equivalent, doesn't have much screen-time with him. Garona is the one with the best character arc. She works to gain the respect of the humans, but is convinced by King Llane to throw it away. That stinks. But the writing is so muddled that it's hard to feel sympathy for the named and nameless characters who bite it. The best laugh of the movie was seeing an actor billed as "One Take Charlie." That actor, by the way, is a sheep. It makes sense in context.

I've seen a few reviews compare this to Battlefield Earth, the famously inept sci-fi film. But Warcraft has one thing that Battlefield Earth doesn't: competent production values. The Orcs, except for Garona, are rendered through motion-capture; the end result is some of the most impressively rendered CGI ever. You'll think that the Orcs are real actors. The spells and kingdoms were also dazzling. The production, costume and makeup design do a great job of rendering the games' Tolkein-esque world. I'd say these values were Oscar-worthy if not for the movie they were used for. And that's a shame.

Warcraft would be a good video game movie if not for the Dune Syndrome. As it turns out, two hours and three minutes is not a good length for a cinematic crash course. You'll do fine if you read up on it before hand. Then again, a few re-writes would've sufficed. If the worst game movies are like watching someone else have fun, this is like you watching them have no fun.