Made by Monkeys

In case you were worried, Legendary, Blizzard, Universal, et al. have already doubled their money, which I’m sure cheers them up in the face of less than stellar reviews.

I can kind of understand the negative direction of these notices. Critics seem almost willing to overlook the fact that this is a video game movie as long as it involves them in a focused plot and three-dimensional characters. Unfortunately, Warcraft is not On the Waterfront or Lawrence of Arabia. It’s a fantasy epic about silly fantasy races and equally silly magic because, you know, the source material is a video game. You can hanker for Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones all you want (and these come up often as the standards for comparison), but what you get is something different.

What you get is a film treatment of the lore on which Warcraft is built. Notice I didn’t say World of Warcraft. This is intended to be a serious adaptation of Warcraft origins — where did characters like Durotan, Gul’dan, Medivh, Lothar, etc. come from? How were the orcs changed by Fell magic? And so on. The “world” of World of Warcraft is definitely there, but people expecting to see a cinematic recasting of the “World of” world should stay at home. They should also stay at home if they expect the IV-drip character development of Game of Thrones or Peter Jackson’s ludicrous video-gameization of Lord of the Rings, because this movie is intended to be as faithful to the Warcraft RTS as possible, as though Blizzard and the film companies got together and asked, “What would happen if we could slow down something like Warcraft III, go down to the ground, and get to know some of these little pixelated figures?”

So that’s what it is. The figures are expanded to “life-size” and given interesting motives, disappointments, crises, and other dramatic movie stuff. Azeroth is very impressive, and this is the movie’s nod to World of Warcraft. Territories look immense and real. Places like Stormwind, Iron Forge, Black Rock, etc. look exactly like you think they will. There’s a little too much gryphon flight, but whatever — it’s a pretty good gryphon or whatever you call that pet. Most interesting of all is the obvious influence of Blizzard artists on production design: practically every detail — down to the look of armor, swords, and shields — is reproduced faithfully from items you would see in the games. It truly is like being on the ground in a Blizzard title.

As for plotting and character development: I didn’t see anything wrong in either of these departments. The plot was appropriately epic and very easy to follow. The characters are as well-realized as they can possibly be. I just don’t understand all the bashing. I guess if anything goes wrong, it’s that the movie is too faithful to its source material and wants to pull the audience into it wholesale rather than portioning it out in more digestible slices. But this, to me, is really a positive, even if it turned out to be an error in judgment. It tells me that Blizzard takes its IPs very, very seriously will not let movie companies change them. This, ultimately, is the best thing about Warcraft. It’s a movie first and foremost for serious Warcraft fans — those wackadoos on the forums who can trace the lineage of the Proudfoots and the Hellscreams and tell you all about other things in the world that you don’t really care about. If you sit there for a few minutes, you’ll figure this out and the movie suddenly becomes quite good.

Enjoyed and would see again. 8.5/10 blood shards.