[Movie Review] Warcraft

Warcraft (2016)

Directed by Duncan Jones
Starring: Travis Fimmel (Anduin Lothar), Dominic Cooper (King Llane Wrynn), Ruth Negga (Lady Taria Wrynn), Tobey Kebbell (Durotan), Ben Schnetzer (Khadgar), Robert Kazinsky (Orgrim Doomhammer), Clancy Brown (Blackhand), Daniel Wu (Gul’dan), Paula Patton (Garona), Ben Foster (Medivh)

Note: I wrote this review over a year ago after I saw the movie in a theater, but I somehow never got around to posting it. I've acquired a copy of the movie and have watched it several times since then.

For those who aren’t aware of this film’s origin, it is based on the hugely popular online multiplayer game World of Warcraft, which has ruled the fantasy MMO field for years. For many people, that’s an immediate negative. There has never been a truly successful and critically accepted adaptation of a video game property. But WoW has a huge world setting with numerous geographic locations, many races, and a lengthy fictional history, which offer more for a filmmaker to work with. In some ways it’s comparable to the Lord of the Rings in scope, though it lacks similar iconic characters. It also has perhaps too many important events to choose from as the main plot conflict – should it be set during this demonic invasion, or that major war with the orcs?

Setting aside whether the production team’s choice of conflict event was wise – I don’t know enough about what happens in the game to make a judgement – I am reviewing this as someone who knows very little about WoW but enjoys high fantasy and wants to see more of it portrayed on-screen. 

Director Duncan Jones, who co-wrote the screenplay, chose an early period in the history of the game world as the setting for his film. The film begins as the game’s long-term antagonists, the orcs, are arriving for the first time on the world of Azeroth. 

Interestingly, the screenwriters chose to make one of the film’s main protagonists one of the orc invaders. After having my primary exposure to cinematic orcs be the two-dimensional innately evil orcs of LOTR, it was refreshing to see an orc portrayed as a three-dimensional individual. The orcs were created by a mixture of motion-capture and CGI rather than prosthetics, because in WoW orcs are much bigger than humans and Jones couldn’t very well cast only 7-foot-tall bodybuilders as his orcs. But the CGI works extremely well. I very quickly forgot that the orcs were digital as the animation was so well done. The same goes for other CGI effects in the film, such as the gryphon mounts, massive cityscapes, and floating buildings. I know they’re not real but they didn’t appear obviously computer-generated. It’s all thanks to Industrial Light & Magic that everything looks so good.

The film presents four main POV characters: Durotan, chief of the Frostwolf Clan, an orc who doesn’t agree that they should be invading Azeroth; Anduin Lothar, human military commander of the Stormwind Kingdom on Azeroth; Khadgar, a young mage who discovers that there’s more to the invasion than just massive orcs appearing out of nowhere; and Garona, a half-orc slave torn between the world of her birth and the opportunities presented by this new world. As I mentioned above, the animation of the orcs was so convincingly done that Durotan is completely believable as a living character, and he’s presented well as a protagonist that the audience can empathize with. Khadgar is also an engaging character, though the script or the editing left some unanswered questions about him that I would really have liked to see answered onscreen. Garona, too, is interesting enough that I wanted to see more of her, and is given a decent development arc. But Anduin Lothar didn’t really appeal to me as a character and I wish that he had been handled differently. I have the feeling that much of his development arc, along with some of Khadgar’s backstory, ended up on the cutting room floor.

Now to the things that I really liked about this movie, in addition to the quality CGI: 
There’s magic. Lots of magic. I’m a great fan of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, in both its cinematic and literary forms, but it just doesn’t have enough magic to satisfy me. Warcraft has my kind of magic. There are three magic-using characters who are integral to the story: Khadgar, Guardian Medivh, and the orc leader Gul’dan. The story does some very nice things with the magic that appeal to me as a long-time player of Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy roleplaying games. Khadgar casts lots of spells. He has to speak some words and sometimes make arcane markings or gestures. The results are always accompanied by digital lighting effects that say ‘This is magic!’ to me, though I suppose to an extent I’m influenced by everything I’ve seen in video games, which are usually the places where the magic is most fun. In addition to big showy spells, and some smaller spells, Warcraft also features an enormous clay golem, which just warms my little D&D-player heart to no end. 

The setting also offers different types of magic – Khadgar and Medivh wield the same variety from the same source and training, while Gul’dan’s magic comes from a different source and doesn’t seem to require any verbal or somatic components. Gul’dan’s magic is evil, because it draws on the life force of other unwilling creatures to fuel it. This is amply demonstrated in one scene: while Gul’dan talks with another orc, an emaciated human prisoner sits beside the orc leader, and periodically Gul’dan draws life energy from his captive with a casual gesture, like a smoker taking a puff from a cigarette. I found that very effectively done, and it did a good job of emphasizing why his magic was evil and how scary he was. The way he keeps sucking out the man’s life, not because he needs the energy for anything but just because he can, makes him seem like an addict.

In addition to the magic, the Warcraft setting has numerous other races/species besides humans (though I'm glad they decided not to use the anthropomorphic pandas in this movie). Near the beginning of the film we see some of the Draenei, a species from the game world that resemble tall blue satyrs. They aren’t onscreen for long, but at least they are shown. There are also elves and dwarves, those staples of magical fantasy worlds. Like the Draenei, the elves and dwarves don’t get much screen time, but at least the audience is reminded that they exist and are important to the world in which the story is set. In addition, the filmmakers went to a great deal of effort to make them look like all of the abundantly available artwork showing how elves and dwarves look in WoW. If you’re going to make a movie set in a game world, the least you can do is keep the visuals consistent with the game world, and Warcraft does that quite successfully. 

Not only are the non-human characters made to look distinct from each other, as close to their game appearance as the filmmakers could make them, and not at all like people just wearing silly prosthetics – even the armor and weapons look those seen in the game. WoW, like many console and online fantasy games these days, hands out some pretty ridiculous armor and weapons to the characters: swords as tall as a man with foot-wide blades, plate armor covered in spikes and flanges and protruding shoulder guards, or armor that protects without actually covering any vital organs. Maybe the production crew should have gone for a more realistic look for the equipment, but if you’re going to make the movie look like the game come to life, why not go all the way? So what if King Llane rides into battle in shiny gold armor covered with embossing that would easily catch a sword, wearing a crown on his head and carrying a shield that would be too heavy to lift. He looks really cool doing it. And he rides into battle astride a gryphon that looks like you could actually go up to it and stroke its huge feathery wings. Perhaps the only place where the cool visuals factor weakened for me a bit is in one scene early in the film in which we see an orc throw a horse at some Stormwind soldiers, but a few minutes later an orc mounts a horse and rides away. Ridiculously impractical weapons I can handle, but non-magical, conditionally-variable physics annoys me.

I mentioned before that there are some things I was less than satisfied with in this movie. The character of Anduin Lothar is the main one. I just didn’t have any interest in his part of the story. He either needed more time spent on his character, or that character should have been made secondary so more time could be devoted to one of the others, like Khadgar or Garona. Clancy Brown didn’t get enough screen time, either, though I’ll admit that’s just a personal complaint because I’ve been a fan if his for decades. A fair amount of the interactions between Anduin, King Llane, and Guardian Medivh implied that they used to hang out together, perhaps as adventurers before they all acquired such important positions. I would have liked to see that story, one describing those characters before they all became so boring. Medivh does get a couple of good scenes that hint at something more to him, but Llane doesn't have much personality. And it may be that Anduin Lothar is so uninspiring to me because I just don't think Travis Fimmel is a very good actor. But everyone else was quite good, considering that half the cast weren't actually visible onscreen.

But probably the most disappointing thing about this movie for me is that other people didn’t go see it. Which means that Hollywood  - and audiences – will continue to think that movies based on video game properties are terrible, and the big studios may be unwilling to fund more Warcraft movies. I liked it enough that I’d go to see more. I don’t really care about seeing more of Anduin’s story, but I want to know what happens to Garona and Khadgar. The film ends with a teaser for a possible sequel, which would presumably focus on the fate of Durotan’s infant son. I’d probably watch that, too, if anyone ever gets to make it. Let’s hope that perhaps the high box office figures from China will encourage the studio to proceed. I want to see more of those elves. In the meantime I'll keep re-watching Warcraft and enjoying the parts of it that I really like.