Warcraft: The Beginning has had quite a journey to the big screen. Announced a full ten years before its 2016 release, there were times when it seemed like nobody was sure whether the project was in motion or just another forgotten rumour abandoned to the dusts of legend. But after a decade languishing in development purgatory with changes of director and untold alterations to its story and script it has finally arrived. The question – was it worth the wait? The answer – a resounding….kind of?
Video games and movies share something of a troubled relationship. On those occasions when the two mediums have intersected, they have aimed for a tender mutual embrace, but sadly one always seems to trip and headbutt the other in the face. It was speculated that Warcraft might be the project to break this long standing curse with its rich setting, but sadly I didn’t find that to be the case. The best I can say is that Warcraft isn’t an awful movie, but it’s also nothing even approaching a great one, not even within its own genre.
To be fair, the task put to Duncan Jones was one so daunting that the fact it was ever even attempted is admirable. Warcraft has its own sprawling history and mythology to rival any fantasy work one would care to mention and transferring that into a two hour film that has to establish and build a cinematic world while telling its own story and getting an audience to care about all the principal players, not to mention sewing the sequel seeds, is no mean feat. But his movies, Moon and Source Code, speak to a proven record of using characters to tell great stories within challenging concepts.
Let’s size it up. The Orcs’ homeworld of Draenor is on the verge of death. The Orc Warlock Gul’dan (Daniel Wu) has managed to unite every Orcish clan under his banner into a massive army he has dubbed The Horde. Gul’dan wields a mysterious and powerful magic known as The Fel, which demands a price of life in exchange for its command. Gul’dan promises to lead The Horde to another world ripe for conquest and, to that end, has constructed a gigantic portal to the verdant, peaceful world of Azeroth. It is fueled by siphoning the life force of captive Drenai – the blue skinned race – with which Orcs share Draenor. Included in this great warband are the Frostwolf Clan, their leader Durotan (Tony Kebbell), his pregnant mate Draka (Anna Galvin) and his friend Ogrim Doomhammer (Robert Kazinsky). These three enter the portal to Azeroth with Gul’dan and a vanguard of the strongest Orc warriors in a bid to strike at the human world and round up enough captives to be used as fuel for the portal, thus bringing the rest of The Horde to Azeroth and making total war against the human kingdom of Stormwind for lebensraum. As classic a reason to wage war as any. Durotan however, has doubts about the consequences of Gul’dan’s Fel magic and, fearing for his clan and family, wonders if brokering a peace with the humans is a better course of action. On the other side of the portal, Azeroth’s military commander, Sir Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmel), meets young mage student Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer) while investigating the recent attacks on human settlements. After discovering evidence of The Fel at work, Khadgar and Lothar urge Stormwind’s noble King Llane Wrynn (Dominic Cooper) to contact The Guardian, Medivh (Ben Foster) – an archmage of great power – to help discover the source of the scourge and stamp it out before war comes to Azeroth. They meet escaped half-Orc slave Garona (Paula Patton) in the process.
Immediately upon reading that – and it’s only the film’s premise – it’s obvious that people who are well versed and personally invested in Warcraft through its life as a video game series are going to get much more from this story than anyone else. Despite the booming popularity of geek culture and fantasy, outsiders will probably have greater difficulty finding any reason to care. There is none of Tolkien’s poetry to be found here, nor the heart and charm of Peter Jackson’s Rings movies. Similarly, anyone looking for the serious and dark adult fantasy of Game of Thrones are likely to see something ridiculous trying to put on a serious face and it does do that – there’s little in the way of fun here. While I’m fully aware that this is neither of those things, only the naive would assume that Blizzard only wants to target their game players. They are clearly trying for a franchise here and I’d think they want to limit their audience to the loyal gamer community as much as Marvel and Warner want only comic readers in attendance – i.e. not at all. It’s a tricky one then. A fantasy epic that has a limited appeal to fantasy fans who don’t already care about the source.
To Jones’ credit, the script does try its best to focus in on the characters in the middle of what will eventually become a gigantic conflict. An aspect of this I was happy to see is the complete subversion of the fantasy trope that ‘the ones who look like us are the good guys and the ones who don’t are evil.’ I thought the story made a pretty bold statement of having the very first scene we see be a private, hopeful conversation between Durotan and his wife Draka – his massive hand resting tenderly on her pregnant stomach. It is made clear in one scene that these are not the cockney Orc bastards of Middle Earth’s Mordor. Warcraft’s Orcs, frightening though they might appear, are not an inherently evil race – they just don’t look like us. They are still shown to value honour, tradition, family and Jones makes it clear that appearances aside, they’re as ‘human’ as we are. In fact of all the subplots woven herein, the ones I most enjoyed are those that concerned the hulking green brutes, particularly Durotan and Draka. The humans, on the other hand, leave a great deal to be desired and I found myself mostly just bored during their scenes that didn’t involve gigantic swords. The performances all round were largely underwhelming, between a couple of unconvincing casting choices and stock fantasy dialogue (some of the lines are legitimate eyebrow raisers) the whole thing just never captures the heart or fully, the attention. Foster at least seemed to be trying to have some fun channeling Jesus and Obi-Wan Kenobi as Medivh.
Aside from those who regard CGI as a blight upon modern filmmaking, anyone should think that visually, the film is impressive. Personally, the Orcs just worked completely for me. They are an imposing presence on screen and utterly convincing in their weight and movement. Their character designs are interesting and really do a fantastic job of putting forward their individual personalities. Gul’dan in particular just looks awesome and every time he was on screen I found myself scanning him for another little detail. Again, the humans not so much. The costumes and particularly the armour designs just look inexplicably impractical, glaringly cheap and somehow gleam with more artificiality than the heavily employed CGI itself. On that note, the world itself fails to present a working, lived in fantasy environment. The human capital of Stormwind, for example, looks as though we are glimpsing it the day after its construction. More of a Disney castle than a medieval urban centre. Others may disagree in that the visual style of World of Warcraft has been replicated quite faithfully, but it all just felt hollow to me. More damning indicators that just because something works as a video game that doesn’t mean it will work on the big screen.
I had read one widely circulated comment since seeing Warcraft: The Beginning dubbing it “the Battlefield Earth of the 21st Century.” While I find that to be utterly unfair, it wouldn’t be amiss to describe it as ‘The Avatar of Fantasy Epics.’