Film News

Warcraft: The Beginning Review

Published

10 years ago

May 31, 2016

Admin

Losing The Battle

♦Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows donned his armour and sharpened his axe to check out Duncan Jones’s Warcraft: The Beginning…

Warcraft: The Beginning

Director: Duncan Jones

Stars: Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Ben Foster, Dominic Cooper, Toby Kebbell, Clancy Brown

Recent Hollywood history is littered with the bodies of films based on video games. Prince of Persia, Doom and Hitman 47 spring to mind as just a few of those big-budget video game movie adaptations that failed spectacularly to engage with their audience or even capture a small flavour of their source material. Warcraft, based on the hugely popular game of the same name from Blizzard, cost $160m to make and was directed by Duncan Jones, who had proved his directing mettle with modest sci-fi critical hits Moon and Source Code.

The film did have a little bit of a checkered production history. It was finished last year but its release date was shifted to avoid it going head to head with the behemoth that was Star Wars: The Force Awakens. So we are at the very end of May and it has hit cinemas in the UK – at least London ones. It has a staggered release around the rest of the country. The plot of Warcraft is standard fantasy fare: the peace of the world of Azeroth is shattered when a group of belligerent orcs use a transdimensional portal to escape their own dying world to colonise another. One of the heads of the Orc Clans, Durotan (Toby Kebbell) tries to sue for peace with the humans but he is fighting a losing battle as Blackhand (Clancy Brown) is determined to subjugate the world to the Orcs’ whims. So the humans of Azeroth are forced to battle against the Orcs to save their world.

Visually, Warcraft is impressive in places. The various environments that the production team have created do look visually striking. But the real problem here is that there is no depth at all to any of the characters. This is a problem that video game films always fall foul of and no-one has managed to strike the correct balance as yet. Not all the visual elements work either: half-human, half-Orc Garona (Paula Patton) walks around with a pair of miniature Orc teeth in her mouth that look like they’ve come out of a Christmas cracker and the plot descends into unintelligible gibberish very quickly. Warcraft lacks any subtlety or any nuance that would lift it above a tawdry video game tie-in. The cast is wasted, especially the normally brilliant Clancy Brown, Vikings‘ Travis Kimmel and Dominic Cooper, fairly impressive recently in AMC’s Preacher, just looks bored.

It is possible that Warcraft may appeal to the players of the game but it has little to offer to the regular cinemagoer, especially one who goes in there expecting the relative complexity of something like Lord of The Rings or Game of Thrones. The characters are flimsy, the dialogue is clunky and cumbersome and by the time you reach the final act, you are constantly checking your watch. Warcraft is the nadir of modern fantasy films and you can add it to the list of films like Prince of Persia, Doom and The Angry Birds Movie, video game adaptations which are empty and dull. Jones is working on sci fi noir Mute next and let’s hope that this may show the sort of flair and imagination he displayed with Moon and Source Code.