Warcraft

I went to the movies today, I haven't done that in a while, so of course I went to see a movie based on a twenty year old video game instead of anything worthwhile. I did not have my hopes up after seeing the trailers, which were pretty appalling if you ask me, but I was hoping at least for something to get good and mad at, I was to be disappointed

I liked it!

Warcraft turns out to be a pretty solid fantasy movie even if you don't know anything about the games, it loosely tells the story of the first game, with Orcs invading through the Dark Portal, and humans attempting to fend them off. Turns out it does that pretty well.

The intention was very clear in this movie that they want to start a franchise, we don't really get a real ending to the story, it is kind of like A New Hope in that respect, a victory of sorts for the putative good guys, but there are a lot of problems that remain and the outcome is still very much in doubt.

Going into this I had problems with the use of CGI, the trailers looked really bad and I doubted I'd be able to take any of the non-human characters seriously, but it turns out that they spent a lot of effort making the Orcs look believable and to give them distinct personalities, even the villains are given a bit more depth than you would expect, Gul'dan is a good example, he is the warlock that is essentially behind the invasion (this is not a spoiler, it is explicitly stated in like the first minute of the movie, but while irredeemably nasty, he still had a couple moments of doing something kind when he didn't have to. It was subtle, but it showed that it was his power that corrupted him, rather than him seeking power because he was evil in the first place.

Honestly the Orc characters where the most compelling ones in the movie, the humans were fine, don't get me wrong, but they weren't really all that memorable unless they were shooting magic everywhere.

The dwarfs still look like rejected designs from The Hobbit, and I think they maybe wanted more of them in the movie but realized that they couldn't make them look right, because there are some interactions that felt to me like they were cut short kind of awkwardly.

The elves looked awful, no two ways about it, the ears especially were just terrible, fortunately we didn't have to look at them often, as they played virtually no role in this movie, hopefully if a sequel rolls around they will get that figured out.

I found the story and setting to be pretty compelling, and the gamer part of me liked seeing locations I had quested in or fought bosses in on the big screen, the tower of Karazhan did that particularly well, as I spent way too much time raiding it back in the day, I recognized rooms and set pieces from the game pretty well recreated in the film.

All in all I think the movie holds up just fine, being a good adaptation and telling the story that Blizzard has decided on as canon believably, and I have to say, starting at the beginning works, I originally thought that starting with Warcraft III would have been the better choice, but this way the scene is set for the future installments which are almost certainly coming, at least based on box office returns so far, at least internationally. It was not reviewed well by critics, but from what I can tell the non-critics who actually watched it appear to like it just fine.

Also, I took issue with character design earlier, specifically with regards to female Orcs, and I have to take it back, the one character that is basically a hot chick with tusks isn't actually a full Orc, and the other lady Orcs actually look like Orcs instead of green skinned humans, so that was nice.

See the movie! I want sequels.