Warcraft [Movie Review]

Discount movie day!
Sure I've seen Zootopia a few more times at the dollar theater... but today I went to see a movie I had yet to see. I wasn't certain it was going to be worth matinee price at the normal run theaters... but I did pay for 3D at the discount theater.

Stormwind, only one of several tasty bits of Scenery Porn.

The protagonist Orc Duroflame, or Durotan... something.

You may be asking, "Why would you do that?" Well, it was very hot today and I wanted to go someplace where I could be cold, and the only convenient time was a 3D showing. So I bit the bullet and saw this movie in 3D.

3.5 out of 5 stars

One of our protagonist humans, Lothal or Lothar... something.

This is King Lane played by Dominic Cooper, he plays Jessie in Preacher.

I still hate 3D. I do not think it added one damn thing to this movie, in fact it may have taken a little bit from it. OK, I will take that back, the magic effects were pretty darn cool in 3D. But aside from the magic castings, 3D adds nothing to the film. 3D sucks, we do not need gimmicks in our movies, we just need good stories and good acting. If I'm going to over pay for a movie, I'm going to one of those theaters with the leather recliners or sit in the silly D-Box seats so that I can get my soda shaken all over me. (Tip: If you like D-Box... just sit near them. Trust me they will bounce you around with you paying for the silly chairs.)

Sadly, this movie does make a few mistakes in this regard. There are times when the acting is just... bad. Some of the lines are delivered so woodenly I'd have sworn Keanu Reeves and his woodpecker were on set. The worst part? Most of the terrible acting scenes are between the human characters. The Orcs sell their scenes.

What happened to you, Jon Snow?

As for the story. Yes. It was accessible to someone who has not touched a Warcraft game since Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. However there are some details thrown in that are probably meant for the hardcore fans. I certainly did not get a lot of the details. This did not completely hinder the story, but there are times when I was watching the Scenery Porn go by, that I wondered if there was something I should know about show city, or organization, or mystical place.

See? Really plastic!

I think aside from the sometimes bad acting, and the times when I was wondering if there was some MMO tidbit I was missing, there were only two other sticking points. First was the attempt to force a romance into the movie, that thankfully never came about. It did involve one of the funnier bits of dialogue in the entire film though... so not all bad. But really, not every movie needs a romance. Sure they work in lots of films, and they can be very good (or very bad...) but we don't always need them.

There are some who call me... Tim.

The last thing is the plastic looking human armor. The Orc armor is perfectly fine. It looks sorta metallic / stone with furs and leather and bone - perfectly crommulent Orc armor. But the human armor jsut looked so fake. I have a feeling it was meant to really approximate the video game armor, but at least try and make it look like metal.

Now this looks like the video games... those are certainly Orc buildings.

Can you believe WETA workshop created that armor? Yeah the people who did CHAPPiE and the armor in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (going back to my Hobbit reviews... I really feel like I over rated those movies, especially the Battle of Five Armies.) made this plastic toy armor. Blows my mind. 

There was a High Elf in this scene with an impressive shelf.

Now for the good stuff. 

There was a story. In fact the story was not half bad. It was better than the story in IDR. It was not complex, which is neither good nor bad. The 'twists' were perfectly trope-ish. I'm not even going to hold their predictability against the film, they were absolutely neither good nor bad. They just were.

You may be asking, how is this a good thing? It is good because it actually had a story. It followed the classic story 'W.' Rising action, set backs, plot... nothing special, but they were there. I actually worried that this movie might not have one.

Now the thing that truly looked awesome, aside from the Scenery Porn, was the magic effects. This movie actually had better magic effects than any live-action fantasy movie I've seen. The magic stole the movie. All of it. The rings of power, the inscribed runes, the pool of power - it was very very well done. Sure that is simply CGI effects, but oddly even the acting in these scenes seemed better. Like the actors were actually able to imagine what they were doing. Then again this was a high magic world... which is nice to see. This is really fantastic fantasy world with all the Griffons, Orcs, and Magic you could want. Here's a short featurette on Warcraft Magic... the good stuff gets going at about the 1:20 mark.      

You know, in the end... I think it was worth the discount theater viewing. I kinda wished I'd seen it in normal vision and not 3D, but oh well. I'm hoping to catch Tarzan at the discount theater since I'm afraid it is not going to last long in the regular run theaters.

Oh, and I'm rather certain that a sequel will be made. It is set up for a sequel.

And the movies subtitle is "The Beginning." That's kinda on the nose, would you not say?

Now sure the domestic box office was a bust... only $46m on a $160m movie. But does that matter when the worldwide box office total was $383m? It made $220m in China alone. If I was Legendary pictures and Blizzard, I'd make the movie just for the Chinese box office totals.

Really WETA? Plastic?