![]() ![]() The sets look cheap, the costumes look silly and the actors are terrible. ![]() When Jones tries to create Azeroth in front of an actual camera, everything falls apart. His influence looms large over the Warcraft film. The hero hactoryīack in 2011, I wrote this profile of Chris Metzen, Blizzard's head writer - a man whose office is filled with Marvel and Blizzard figurines. The performance capture used to create them is very good, and the orcish cast - notably Toby Kebbell as the noble chieftain Durotan - are more sympathetic and engaging than their live-action counterparts. Best of all are the orcs themselves, savage, proud, bigger than life and fearsome in battle. Much is made of grandiose aerial shots of storied locations like the city of Stormwind and the magical fortress of Karazhan, but I preferred the brief in-jokes - a Murloc here, a Polymorph there - and the potent, neon crackle of the magic effects. And, intentionally or not, it stumbles on an interesting parable in its sympathetic treatment of the outwardly gruesome orcs: they are zealous but desperate fugitives of an uninhabitable world, trying to claw their way to safe harbour on the humans' green and pleasant land.įor a Warcraft fan, there are pleasures to be had in seeing this world on the big screen, too. The script has a greater sense of narrative purpose than many recent blockbusters you could name (the last two Hunger Games, for starters). It will probably baffle anyone with no knowledge at all of Warcraft. It's not a good film: dry, garbled, plot-heavy and charm-free, with a seriously anticlimactic ending and strained production design that doesn't manage to resolve the games' outlandish look into a coherent mix of CGI and live action. Warcraft's chief failing is not a lack of respect for the source material, but an excess of it. Still, it's such an earnest effort, so clearly made with love, that its failure to break ranks with the long line of dreadful movie adaptations of great video games is almost tragic. In World of Warcraft, it's the place that matters, not the story - something perhaps even Blizzard itself doesn't fully understand. Then we had to sit on it for 18 months, because film PR is really weird.Ībove all, that subtitle suggests that the film's director and co-writer Duncan Jones - the talented director of sci-fi nuggets Moon and Source Code - has set out to begin an ascent of the mountain of lore created by Blizzard's head writer Chris Metzen and his team over the course of 20 years, and that this task has overwhelmed what should have been his primary goal: giving life to the anarchic pop-fantasy universe still loved and inhabited by millions of players worldwide. A day in real-life AzerothĪ couple of years ago, Jon Hamblin visited the set of the Warcraft movie for Eurogamer and interviewed director Duncan Jones and members of the cast and production staff. An admission to fans of World of Warcraft that this wouldn't quite be their Azeroth: the film turns the clock back a generation to tell, roughly, the story of the 1994 strategy game Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, and is more focused, but much reduced in scope from WOW's vivid tableau of squabbling races. This film's unsatisfying status as a set-up, rather than a main event. The producers' hubris in taking a future franchise as a fait accompli. Everything misguided about this production can be read into the two words after that colon. The point at which we should have known that the decade-in-the-making Warcraft film (released in the UK today) wasn't going to work out was when its title was extended to Warcraft: The Beginning. ![]()
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