"Warcraft" | MOVIE REVIEW

Mainstream critics have been s***ting on this movie, but is it actually as bad as everyone says it is?

 

Warcraft was directed by Duncan Jones (the director of Moon and Source Code – which are movies I still have oddly not seen) and is the film adaptation of the very first Warcraft game, Warcraft I: Humans and Orcs. That being said, this is technically a video game movie, and video game movies don’t exactly have a history of being well-received by critics. I haven’t enjoyed too many of them, myself, with Prince of Persia being the only notable exception. So, how does the Warcraft movie hold up?

I’m gonna tell you right off the bat that this movie isn’t as bad as everyone says it is. It’s actually quite entertaining, and for a number of reasons.

For one, the visual effects in this movie were amazing. The architecture and scenery in the movie is really well-detailed and feels very at home with the stuff you see in the Warcraft video games. Even the weapons and the armor look like they were literally taken out of the game and polished off. You can tell there was a lot of heart and passion put into the visual effects in this movie, and it especially shows with the Orcs, because they looked realistic as f**k. That’s impressive stuff, especially since I’d seen The Jungle Book a couple of months prior.

Second, the action was intense. It was gritty, it was brutal, and, in spite of not showing too much blood, was very cringeworthy in the sense that it made your skin jump when someone got hit by a massive-ass hammer because you could tell that that dude had officially become jelly on the inside. The battles were entertaining to watch, as well. That stuff was cool.

And the score was great, too – granted, any score from Ramin Djawadi is guaranteed to sound great. I mean listen to this stuff, man.

Touching on some of the narrative elements, I thought Durotan was easily the best character in this movie, probably since he was the most developed and well-rounded of all of them. You could really feel him as a character, and he really just pulled you into the movie.

And Durotan aside, the villain and the third act of this movie were both easily the next-best parts of this movie’s narrative aspects. Gul’Dan was bad-ass, and he shows you why he’s at the head of this Orc warband. And the third act was really well-executed, as well, because that’s when everything really comes to a boil.

However, I’m not gonna deny that Warcraft isn’t without its flaws. And, sadly, for all the good the kick-ass third act did, most of the movie’s weaknesses come from its narrative aspects. The movie sort-of just breezes through the events of the first and second acts and doesn’t dive too deep into those details. The human characters aren’t fleshed out too well, and you didn’t really understand why they were acting the way they were.

And I felt like some of the acting was choppy, too, especially for Paula Patton’s and Callum Keith Rennie’s characters. I didn’t buy into Garona or Moroes at all, and I felt that the movie could’ve just done without them.

And the romance between Paula Patton’s and Travis Fimmel’s character was just put in there for the sake of having it in there.

However, like I mentioned earlier, I did enjoy this movie, in spite of its many flaws. I’m probably just a sucker for high fantasy movies, but I’ll say that Warcraft is deserving of a Jar-Jar thumbs-up.

Also, I heard there’s a director’s cut for this one, and I kinda wanna see that.

So, those are my thoughts on Warcraft. Have you seen it? Let me know what you think about it. And, as always, this has been Rafa – and stay classy.