WARCRAFT

Warcraft

Grade: C

Starring: Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Ben Schnetzer, Ben Foster, and Dominic Cooper,
And As Orcs: Toby Kebbell as Durotan, Daniel Wu as Gul’dan, Anna Galvin as Draka, and Robert Kazinsky as Orgrim

Premise: When a dark sorcerer creates a portal allowing hordes of monstrous, bloodthirsty orcs to attack a kingdom of humans, it’s up to the humans’ wizard Guardian and a band of heroes and outcasts to find a way to stop them.

Rated PG-13 for strong violence, gory/disturbing images, and some emotional content

I went into Warcraft knowing it wasn’t going to be great. I’ve never played any version of the popular World of Warcraft game from Blizzard Entertainment, and I didn’t figure a movie starring ugly CGI troll-ish orcs as some of its main characters would exactly be Shakespeare. I didn’t even think its fantasy elements would make it a Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or Chronicles of Narnia. I just hoped it would be a reasonably entertaining live-action/CGI mash-up, like a cheaper, less allegorical Avatar.

Shortly after the movie started, I began to panic, as its early scenes hinted Warcraft was dead on arrival—horribly-written, filled with one-note characters whose names I could barely understand, going to and from places whose names I couldn’t pronounce, and not the merest hint of traction anywhere except in battle scenes. At that point, I thought “oh, crap, this is going to be a lousy movie that could only possibly appeal to people who’ve played the game and must be grinning at all the famous place/character references I’m not getting”. I felt sure I was in for two hours of torture. Well, slowly, I began to realize the movie was developing a pulse—one still very feeble compared to the likes of LOTR, but one nonetheless--so that I actually felt the weight of the stakes in the later going and wanted to see what happened. And then…huh? Unexplained plot twists, way-too-easy contrivances, a rushed ending, and…oh, they’re setting up a sequel…why, of course! Ultimately, I would say, while Warcraft only met the lower half of my expectations/hopes, it was decent enough. I doubt I’ll see the sequel(s), but it was still a more engaging time at the theater than, say, Anchorman 2 or Pixels—the worst movies I’ve seen in theaters in recent years.

Plot

In an ancient, primitive alien world dominated by the tusked, muscle-bound, troll-like orcs, an intimidating overlord named Gul’dan (voice/movements of Daniel Wu) has gained followers by his powerful use of a dark magic called the Fel, which largely involves draining the life energy from beings and using it for his own purposes. Having gathered huge amounts of followers (and prisoners whose life energy he can use with the Fel), Gul’dan decides to send a “war band” (a large scouting party) of orcs through a massive, Fel-powered gate portal and see what they find. If they find a world with resources and, more importantly, kingdoms to conquer and people to rule, they will send the entire “horde” (orc population) through to complete the conquest. Draining the life energy from hundreds of prisoners, Gul’dan sends his war band through the portal.

They arrive in the lush kingdom of Azeroth, which is ruled and kept safe by King Lane (Dominic Cooper) and his brother-in-law Lothar (Travis Fimmel). As villages and towns are plundered and corpses keep piling up, Lothar—along with a young sorcerer-in-training named Kadgar (Ben Schnetzer)—is sent to seek guidance from the wizard-like Guardian (Ben Foster). Kadgar and the Guardian deduce that the very dangerous Fel is at the center of whatever is happening, and that its power will only grow unless they can find the source. They get more information after a scouting party led by Lothar catches an orc prisoner, Garona (Paula Patton), who has a green tinge to her skin and has the prominent lower teeth of the orcs but is otherwise more human than the others. She informs them that Gul’dan is just gathering prisoners whose life energy he can use with the Fel to open the gate portal once more, to unleash the horde. Lothar, King Lane, Kadgar, and the Guardian all promptly begin to argue over the best way to go about attacking the enemy forces. Things get more complicated when they are approached by an orc named Durotan (Toby Kebbell) who claims to be against Gul’dan and who, along with his followers, wants to fight with the humans against the evil overlord.

What Works?

I’ll give Warcraft credit—even though the features of the completely-CGI orcs aren’t very pretty, they’re impressively rendered, and you can even understand most of their dialogue. Moreover, the drama amongst the orcs, what with the scheming Gul’dan, a good guy/bad guy turncoat named Orgrim, and Durotan’s struggle with whether to rebel against Gul’dan, is often more compelling than the human drama (yes, I realize this is both a good and a bad thing, but there you go). Yes, sadly, most of the human characters are paper-thin and are played with barely an ounce of actual feeling. That said, Paula Patton and Ben Schnetzer make impressive contributions, infusing their characters with as much meaning as any characters could in this half-baked CGI brouhaha. Schnetzer’s Kadgar actually does more within the movie’s two hour span than the rest of the cast put together. Unsurprisingly, Warcraft is at its best and most compelling on the battlefield—even if this is the kind of action movie where the bad guys kills scores of nameless, faceless CGI characters but can barely touch the recognizable good guys, who dispense of much larger foes with little trouble. Warcraft does have a couple one-on-one orc battles that prove exciting. And, I have to give the movie credit, in a nod to the famously-unpredictable George R.R. Martin—who penned the popular fantasy series Game of Thrones—in a surprising turn of events, one good guy snuffs it in a moment of high action, in the kind of moment in which the good guy nearly always triumphs in cheap action movies like this one.

What Doesn’t Work?

Oh, boy. Put it this way—Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, Game of Thrones, all these popular, pedigreed fantasy franchises—Warcraft is none of these. The orcs have names and accents that are hard to understand, the names of places in the movie are either hard to pronounce/understand or completely forgettable, and a couple of the more important human characters have no defining traits at all. The writing is poor, so I won’t entirely blame the actors for the latter...but King Lane has to be the most boring monarch ever portrayed in fiction—Cooper’s portrayal has no personality whatsoever. As his brother-in-law, accomplished warrior Lothar—the closest thing the movie has to a traditional hero—Vikings’ Travis Fimmel mostly grins stupidly and murmurs weak one-liners like he’s embarrassed to be saying them (which he probably is). And yes, the script here has the audacity to try and write Patton’s actually dimensional character into a “passionate romance” with the lazily-penned Lothar—probably THE most pathetic, forced, chemistry-free movie romance I’ve ever beheld. And I was dreadfully sad to see Ben Foster—he of the very compelling performances in 3:10 to Yuma and The Messenger—slumming through the role of the Guardian, playing the powerful but weary bearded wizard like a grunge band member with a bad hangover.

Mostly, the movie is cliché, at times hard to follow (and hard to care about), and has little discernible narrative flow. It also doesn’t help that nearly everything in the movie—from the humans/elves/dwarves dynamic to the humans-versus-CGI creatures angle to the evil warlock dynamic to the dashing hero/brave, outcast woman romance—has been done before, and done much better, multiple times. It’s not hard to think of those movies and yearn for their depth and creativity.

Content

The most off-putting thing about Warcraft is that it’s cheesy and seems like it’s only for fans of the game. Otherwise, there are a few gory details in the way of killings and maimings of both humans and orcs, not to mention Gul’dan’s way of sucking the energy out of power leaves their bodies shrunken and twisted. This isn’t an especially hard, heavy PG-13, it’s just a matter of watching and caring.

Bottom Line

I vowed I was going to see Warcraft (despite no exposure to the game) and I did. I didn’t expect it to be very good, but I hoped for the best—maybe an Avatar-esque humans-meet-CGI characters throwdown, and…well, I probably won’t ever watch it again and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is not a fan of the game, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Incredibly, it did develop a pulse once it got going, there are a few compelling characters, the graphics are pretty decent, and there were a couple actual, honest-to-God twists that threw me…this from what was overall a pretty poorly-written film. Oh, but it’s another one of those movies that becomes annoying to watch when you realize this whole movie was basically setting up a sequel you doubt you’ll pay money to see.

Warcraft (2016)

Directed by Duncan Jones

Screenplay by Duncan Jones and Charles Leavitt

Story and Characters by Chris Metzen, based on Blizzard Entertainment’s “World of Warcraft”

Rated PG-13

Length: 123 minutes