'Warcraft' Review

Warcraft Review:

More Like No Craft

BY IAN TAN

When the poster looks better than the movie.

Warcraft brings director Duncan Jones (of Moon and Source Code fame – both terrific films) to the blockbuster scene. It’s always a risk to hire relatively small-time directors to direct a major 160 million dollar studio film. On one hand, they tend to know how to build characters and tell a good story. On the other, they may not deal too well with studio restrictions and a budget that’s over ten-times bigger than what they usually work with. In some cases, it works pretty well (see: James Wan’s Furious 7), and in others, not so much (see: Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man films). With that being said, how does Duncan Jones fare with Warcraft? Let’s just say he’s more Webb than he is Wan.

The plot is relatively simple – an orc and a human must join forces in order to put an end to an evil orc force that plans to destroy and colonize the human world. The former world is dying, and their invasion to the latter world will spell extinction for the humans. However, an orc by the name of Dorutan sees the evil behind his kind’s doings and aims to stop it before war breaks loose between the two races. That seems like an interesting plot to drive a fantasy action flick such as Warcraft, but the film unfortunately never lives up to its full potential.

 

Hoping the Director's Cut will be better like...

While Duncan Jones’ previous films followed a small few characters, Warcraft handles ten times that amount, and Jones doesn’t seem to have a good handle on it. There are characters that start out as promising, such as Durotan – who is played fantastically through motion-capture by Toby Kebbell – and Paula Patton’s Garona, but neither of their stories are fleshed out enough for us to truly be engaged in their characters. All other characters are simply bland or downright unmemorable. Travis Fimmel, who plays the main human character Lothar, is given a father-son story (him being the father) that’s supposed to be one of the more emotionally engaging story threads, but it completely falls flat due to poor and uncharismatic acting from both Fimmel and Burkely Duffield, who plays his son. The two human magicians in the film – played respectively by Ben Foster and Ben Schnetzer – are just miscast. Ben Foster looks like he’s trying to be a Zen-like cross between Gandalf/Dumbledore and comes off as pretentious while Khadgar (Schnetzer), who is meant to be the underdog-turned-hero/comic-relief struggles to maintain his American accent, is very unfunny and lacks screen presence.

Opening up the Tesseract

But where Jones fails in characters, he triumphs in visuals. The CGI for the orcs and both the human and orc realms are stunning and immersive. Close-ups of Durotan specifically look as realistic as a CGI character can get. The action is alright; nothing to really shout about and nothing we haven’t already seen in other fantasy-adventure films. Also, we never really get to see the orc-human team up that the film seems to build up, which is a letdown. And a side note about the villain – I’m not sure why but he looked like the kind of villain I’d expect to find in a Kung Fu Panda movie.

 

CGI doesn't get any real-er than this.

What really upsets me is that this film had so much potential. Warcraft has scenes that seem to reminisce the emotional heights of The Lord of the Rings films, but because there’s no real build-up to any one of those scenes, they all come off as oddly placed and wholly unemotional. The poor pacing and editing doesn’t help very much either. There is a great movie somewhere in here, but it never reveals itself. I sincerely hope the Director’s Cut fills in the holes this theatrical version has plenty of, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll get that really great film the theatrical cut struggles to be.

Score: 5.6 out of 10