Warcraft - Movie Review!

Who's In It?

Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Ben Foster, Dominic Cooper, Ben Schnetzer, Daniel Wu, and Toby Kebbell


What's It About?

When the Orc world of Draenor is dying, mage Gul'dan uses "the fell" (death magic) to open a portal to human/dwarf/night elf world of Azeroth. He allows a war band through to capture lives to reopen the portal to allow the entire Orc Horde through.

Any Good?

I grew up playing Warcraft 3 and I still LOVE it, but even from the set release date I was extremely skeptical. At the start of the film I was in the mindset of it will be a feature length Blizz cutscene, which are always amazing. Then the 'actors' opened their mouths.

The human actors are AWFUL. They're wooden and emotionless, and for some reason the people drift between a half English accent and the worst American one you'll ever hear. While the King is wooden and the Defender cheesy, the mage Kadgar is quite possibly the worst performance I've seen in years.

When Kadgar speaks it's like he's reading it out loud in 4th class, which I'm fairly sure he actually was because he was always looking off centre. On the other end of the spectrum the voices for the Orcs were done really well. Gul'dan sounds ancient and dangerous, while Durotan sounded truly conflicted.

Orgrim

Speaking of the Orcs, their CGI/props were fantastic. Apart from the woman painted green with small fake fangs, they were huge muscly monsters that looked like they'd be terrifying. I loved Gul'dan, even past the crap magic effects he was old and green (some orc ancestors drank fell blood and that turned them green) and had huge spines out his back. 

The rest was like the Hobbit, but much worse. It really pushed the shiny human cities thing which made them pure white shine. The film itself was wayyy too bright even under 3D glasses, it was all glare and no reality behind it. The worst though was definitely the Orc baby, the babies in Shrek looked better.

After watching Warcraft I couldn't decide if it was bad, just that it was in no way good enough. In an industry with Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and the way the Hobbit was received, this was incredibly sub-par. Now that I've thought about it, yes it really is bad. Looking back on the Hobbit movies they're not good, but Warcraft is like the cheap imitation of those films.

Honestly I'd say see it yourself and decide, people seemed to like it as we were leaving. But as a LotR, Warcraft, and fantasy fan in general it was just not good enough.

Rating: