I was a fan of the games way back when they were new. I never played any of the online game World of Warcraft though even though it is my understanding that this has a huge fan-base and makes tons of money.
Because it is such a common word with gamers, when this popped up on Netflix I figured I would give it a go especially when you consider the $160 million budget that went into making it. At first, I was entertained, then it lulled, then I got lost and didn't know what the hell was going on, then I got bored, then I quit.
I don't think the story here needs any introduction to anyone and honestly it isn't a very good story. In this film the Humans and Orcs are not really at war with one another initially, but something bad starts happening among the Orc "world" and they open a portal that leads them to be facing off against the humans. Then basically a bunch of fighting happens and the CGI dominates almost all of what is going on the screen.
That's basically the movie and while that might be ok with some people that are massive fans of WoW, I don't think it really resonates all that well with the general population.
[src](https://edge.alluremedia.com.au/m/g/2016/06/warcraft-movie-images-hi-res-8.jpg)Another thing that gets under my skin about this is that they had a massive budget of nearly 200 mil, yet a lot of the scenes still look quite fake. I think that this film would have been better off if they had simply made it animated instead. Why they decided to go the route that they did doesn't make much sense to me since they almost certainly could have made this more visually appealing by simply making it animated instead of going for a 300 approach.
[src](https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/5759c5621e43ab7160f25bcb/master/pass/warcraft-movie-review.jpg)I mean look at this; that is a scene from the actual film and nothing in that scene other than Travis Fimmel (who you probably recognize from Vikings) looks real. I don't know how much more money they would have needed to spend on it in order to make it look realistic but I guess more than $160 million.
The film did very poorly in US theaters and it was only due to the international marketing and release that this film didn't lose buckets of cash. I don't know how much money they made in the end because I can't find how much they spent on marketing the film overseas, but it was considered a commercial disappointment despite raking in nearly $440 million at the box office.
There are very few professional critics that had anything positive to say about this movie and I agree with most of what I read especially where one critic said "too many mysterious proper nouns being thrown into conversation and at least 12 major characters competing for space." Therein lied the major problem for me: I didn't know who the hell they were talking about half the time and this made the story extremely difficult to follow. I tried to simply focus on the action - which is clearly what this film is all about but like I said before, a lot of this seemed fake and forced. The mythology is presented to us in a fast-forward fashion as well, and this makes those of us that are not WoW players extremely confused.
Even die-hard fans of the games didn't care much for this film and it currently has a 28% rating on Rotten Tomatoes
Should I watch it?
I think the only way that most people are going to be able to enjoy this film would be if they basically just skip all of the dialogue and head straight to the action sequences because like I said before, the story is tough to follow and at the end of it all it is just a long winding pathway to the orcs and humans uniting against a common threat - that is what I did and the ending battles were pretty cool. I reckon about 50% of the overall budget was spent on that. The character development is a waste of time and most video game movie adaptations suffer from this same common flaw. I'm not going to say to avoid it because parts of it are entertaining but for the most part, there is no real story there and anything other than the action could easily be skipped and you wont be missing out on much.
