"Warcraft" Review

The spawn of the late David Bowie just made a live-action movie out of arguably the most popular MMORPG video game ever created. Filmmaker Duncan Jones has a proven track record of marvelous independent work, such as MOON with Sam Rockwell and Source Code with Jake Gyllenhaal. His first foray into studio filmmaking is something of a beautiful disaster. Warcraft isn't nearly as awful as the mainstream critics would have you believe; there are some visual cues here that signify the hand of a director who knows what he's doing. The problem is that Jones (but moreso perhaps Universal and Legendary) can't make the human characters work, which is frankly shocking for a storyteller whose previous work suggests he's a master at crafting compelling human drama. For better and for worse, Warcraft often feels like an indie movie trapped in a blockbuster's body. This is a fantasy that feels at once both intimate and epic, but poor editing and uninspired performances largely keep Warcraft from confidently bursting the bad video-game-to-movie bubble.

The story that Jones and his co-writers Charles Leavitt and Chris Metzen takes its cues naturally from the lore of the game itself, which fans are sure to love. Humans and orcs have been at odds for centuries. Now, the leader of the Horde is Gol'dan (voiced by Daniel Wu), a mage of sorts who wields a deadly power called "the fell." Everywhere Gol'dan and the Horde go, everything around them dies, even the orcs' own home world. Faced with extinction, the orcs open a portal to the human realm with the expectation that they'll kill all the humans and make a new home. The humans operate under the banner of the Alliance in a nearby kingdom. Their bravest warrior, Lothar (Vikings' Travis Fimmel), leads an army under the command of King Llane (Dominic Cooper). When Lothar discovers that the orc threat will not be defeated by humans alone, he enlists the help of a powerful young mage Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer), the guardian of the human realm Medivh (Ben Foster), and a beautiful half human-half orc named Garona (Paula Patton).

Now the kicker is that there are orcs who see the error of Gol'dan's ways and decide that the best way to defeat him and save their kind is to team up with the humans. Durotan (voiced by Toby Kebbell) and his band of orcs befriend Lothar knowing that Gol'dan won't stand a chance against their unified strength.

If that all sounds a bit nerdy, trust me... it is. But as I sit here typing, I recall that the film has a modest share of twists and turns that buck traditional franchise formula, at least in Marvel's sense of the word these days. Granted, to speak on them would be to court massive spoilers, and we don't want that.

I will say, however, that I was surprised at how much more compelling the orcs were than the humans. Kebbell does a stellar job with motion capture and voice acting for Durotan. The trailers made this movie look like a montage of bad CGI in a movie that would play out like one long video-game cutscene. Turns out, the CGI is really solid, inasmuch as  the orcs themselves actually look like living, breathing characters. This makes the violence feel much more brutal. There are some gnarly stabbings, slashings and decapitations that spray green blood on the camera lens here and there. Pretty intense for PG-13 but so was Lord of the Rings.

The film also never feels like a cutscene from a video game. It always feels like a "movie," or if the humans are talking to each other, a medieval soap opera.

Seriously, as good as the orcs and the CGI are, the humans are really a drag to watch. I think Fimmel and Foster are horribly miscast. Fimmel proves incapable of carrying a potential franchise at this stage in his career. He mumbles nearly every word and has about as much leading-man charisma as a sack of rocks. Foster gives his all but manages to be impossible to take seriously as "the guardian of the human realm." Maybe it's the Gandalf hairpiece? Patton and Cooper are tolerable; any scenes with them are made better by their presence, but the material they've got to work with is just not very engaging.

The other big problem I had with Warcraft probably isn't Jones' fault. When you make a big tentpole film like this for major studios like Universal and Legendary, who specialize in this sort of cinematic spectacle, your art becomes a regulated commodity. It has to fit into a certain hole in order to appease investors. When that happens, "final cut" is usually taken away from the filmmakers and given to the businessmen who don't really know what good art is supposed to look like. That said, this movie is cut to shit with poorly placed edits everywhere. Some scenes feel cut short while others feel out of place entirely. It's a shame to think how much better this movie might have been if Jones had full creative control. As it stands, the film doesn't quite have enough good to entirely offset the bad. Warcraft surprised me in ways that you'll probably have to see for yourself in order to completely understand. It's not a complete disaster, but it won't be Jones' first film in The Criterion Collection either.

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