Warcraft

I'd hardly have anything to fault about it, except for the weird king character, whom I found rather bland and unhelpful given that he was a king and his decisions (however they were at the end of the film) had a big impact. I liked the story, basically I found most of the characters likeable, or at least I didn't develop any aversion to them. I liked Orc Durotan the most, of course, as did many others. But it just didn't have that something that makes you fall in love with it, that makes you leave the theater excited. Yes, it was a fine spectacle and I wasn't bored, but for all the magic the characters had in the film, it didn't quite have real magic. A very strong 3 stars and I'm curious to see the sequel. (2016-06-18)

It's like an intro to a computer game that I thought for a long time I'd like to play. But when it's over, my motivation is gone. It's a bit like a movie for people who have forgotten what a movie should be like. The storyline is provisional and the attempt to send it through several "deep" dialogues is absolutely amateurish. The characters are sympathetic but 2D. The world ends behind the scenes. I would love to see a full-blooded fantasy that awakens the imagination, but Warcraft rather exhorts to passivity with its "from action to action and in the meantime, don’t ask anything" model. It’s too bad. Duncan Jones is partly responsible for a new wave of clever sci-fi films, but his first fantasy will only amaze China. There, too, the imagination is limited and the audience can get drunk on cucumber dressing. (2016-06-29)

Essentially, you could say that it’s a rather adequately made absolute fantasy movie with everything that goes with it. So no Tolkien-like more history than fantasy or something in the style of The Game of Thrones, where it’s only after the end of the first season that you realize that this isn’t exactly a movie from the middle ages, but that it contains traces of fantasy as well. With this movie, that is clear already with the first digital orc character that appears in the first scene. At that point I realized that there was no other way, as the entire world of Warcraft is based mainly on nations such as elves, orcs, goblins, dwarves or the undead and humans are rather an ancillary nation. Or they do have their place in all this, but it is comparable to that of the other races. So, it took me about half the movie to get used to this film world. It was incredibly colorful, and the digital effect guys did a lot of work as well and looking for a part of the real world in this movie would be as hard as looking for a beer in a crate of Bud Light. But the second half of the movie got me up from my chair and despite initially thinking that I might not watch the movie to the end, the final war scene actually satisfied me, more or less. This doesn’t mean I would need to see the sequel, but on the other hand, I must agree that Blizzard managed to keep an eye of everything. I guess fans of “WoW” or “DotA” will probably die of bliss. (2016-10-03)

This is surprisingly good work. It pulls at the gate without hesitation with the vigor of the Horde to engage the imagination of the Alliance at times. In the first case, it offers monumental and clear battles, in the second good personal moments, catchphrases, and even emotional highlights of heroic self-sacrifice. Jones' flick would have deserved another half-hour to introduce that world in a little more detail so that the viewer could get a better look at the inner threads of each side of the feud. However, I understand that the studio wanted a decoy that would score better if the viewer was fooled by the special effects artists and Djawadi's thunderous vibrations so that it could serve us a distinctive trilogy thanks to the earnings. I already consider Mortal Kombat and Silent Hill to be good video game adaptations, but Warcraft will hopefully break the genre floodgates to quality cinema for others. (2016-08-05)

Warcraft has high production value with a gorgeous fantasy world and great costumes, visually polished down to the last detail. I didn’t mind the absence of bigger stars, as I consider Ben Foster a great actor in his own right. My issues with the movie lie with my ignorance of the game, the rules of its world and types of spells, as well as with the dramaturgical simplicity of the story – I wasn’t too engaged by the racial conflict, had to divide my attention between too many characters and the deaths of some of them were given too little space with respect to their importance in the story. (2016-06-27)