Warcraft's excellent dedication to the source material its based on should satisfy fans of the game, but for those who are not familiar with it will find that the movie looks beautiful and has stunning action scenes but it lacks an easy to follow story and has some confusing character motivation and choices.
I should start off by noting that I have not played World of Warcraft (or WoW as some call it), the game the movie is based on. I am familiar with some of the terms as the game had a massive presence in pop culture. It's clear that this movie is looking to fill the void left by Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia and many other fantasy franchises that just never got off the ground. The movie also has to fight the uphill battle of adapting a video game with a dedicated fandom into a movie, a feat never done successfully in Hollywood as seen by critical and box office bombs like Pixels, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, and anything Uwe Bowl has directed.
It's a tough job adapting something like WoW into one movie with its deep lore. Warcraft focuses on the battle between the humans and orcs , a race of creatures who must leave their homeland as it is being destroyed by a dark power and must now conquer the world of the humans in order to survive. This simple premise is buried under many different plots scattered in the movie. You have the conflict, as well as the drama involving the character of "The Guardian" and his magical powers corrupting him, plus the drama in both the orc and human camps, and the idea of an orc/human half breed and a spell caster society and thousands of other non important elements that bog the movie down. It's becoming more common that a movie based on something like a TV show or a video game must cram everything it can into one movie. Imagine having two seasons of Game of Thrones shoved into one movie. There is too much story to follow and very little time for the audience to take a break and get to know the characters.
But it is the deep lore that got people interested in the game in the first place so in a way, it is one of the better video game movies to come out. You can tell that the people involved in the project are fans of the source material and want to make sure it gets adapted in the best way possible. Its a movie for the fans and in that sense is where the movie was destined to fail. Audiences aren't flocking to the fantasy movie like they've done before. This can be chalked up to a lot of things: the rise of comic book movies, the backlash the genre gets due to its very bizarre fandom, how liking anything to do with fantasy (except for Game of Thrones) is viewed as childish and border line bizarre, franchises like The Hobbit wearing people down with its complicated story and many characters, the list goes on. Stories about knights fighting creatures do not have the draw like the stories of caped crusaders fighting men of steel do. But through the change of pop culture, the fandom to WoW has stayed steady and the loyalty to the game's company, Blizzard, has only grown as the years have gone on.
Warcraft represents the good and bad of video game and fantasy adaptations. Convoluted stories that have too many characters and are not easy to follow but it still has that feeling of epic that can only be found in fantasy movies and video games. If you are a fan of the source material and even if you're a little curious to see something like this I recommend you see the movie but those not aware of the source material can skip it.
Grade: C-
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