BRING YOUR CONTROLLER
Warcraft
Review by Paul Preston
I consider myself a pretty savvy filmgoer. I’ve seen a lot of movies and often know how a movie is asking you to watch it. But I gotta admit that halfway through Warcraft, I was pretty damn puzzled as to what the hell was going on.
“Khadgar persuades Lothar and Llane Wrynn, King of Stormwind, to consult his reclusive master Medivh, the fabled Guardian, about the Fel.”
Problem number one of Warcraft is a rampant inability to understand the orcs. It seems like it wouldn’t be easy to understand them if you were standing in front of them, given their mouth over-running with teeth, but for the purposes of storytelling, they could me more comprehensible. Every line is put through a deep-and-otherworldly-nator, but the effect is confusing, especially when they’re saddled with saying things like “Orgrim, protect Draka from Gul’dan’s magic”. Not a quote, but they say stuff like that all the time.
Director Duncan Jones, of the great Moon and underrated Source Code, certainly has put together a sprawling epic, often including shots that I’m sure look just like wide-shot maps used in the video game (I don’t play – but many of the weapons and spells have to be nods to the fans). But Jones doesn’t drum up the necessary care for these characters to be as affected as I’m sure he’d like me to be when they start dropping in the wartime finale. And they do start dropping. There’s no mystery at the film’s end that they’d like this to be a franchise, but don’t get to close to any characters you’d like to see in the sequel.
There’s some betrayal and a corruption or possession or something of one of the wizards and the piling on of effects didn’t help me sort it out. And Jones’ direction yielded no real tension or suspense to keep me glued. A few surprises (again, as major characters suffer a cruel fate), but no tension, and no real stakes or reward for their sacrifice (as was also missing with Han Solo).
Faring the best in this mix is Ben Foster as a guardian wizard charged with protecting the human realm, and that’s mainly because he’s good in everything. Paula Patton is a half-orc who sides with the humans and somehow gets to be gorgeous as a hideous orc, no doubt the will of the studio there, as poor Anna Galvin, as full-orc Draka, is all-CGI and a horrific beast. The other CGI characters are acted in motion capture by Toby Kebbell, Clancy Brown, Robert Kazinsky, Daniel Wu and more. One of the film’s opening shots is of Duratan, the orc who eventually seeks out peace with the humans, and the humanity in his face is alarming, as technology can really express that nowadays. But that isn’t kept up in favor of many scenes that look like Leroy Jenkins just ran in the room.
The score gets the most points for me (by Ramin Djawadi), successfully reflecting a medieval sound and the march of war. But overall this is a humorless adventure with half-baked drama and too much confusion to allow me to get really involved. If they had a relationship as strong as Harry and Dumbledore, the wealth of special effects would have more meaning.
Directed by: Duncan Jones
Release Date: June 10, 2016
Run Time: 123 Minutes
Country: USA/China/Canada
Rated: PG-13
Distributor: Universal Pictures
