Warcraft

Duncan Jones tries to appeal to fans of all kinds of the source material, as well as those unaffected by Warcraft, but in my case, he only made it halfway, stumbling along the way. When unfamiliar characters appear a few minutes into the film, looking deadly serious and throwing around unfamiliar names, titles, or at least mysterious words like "Gul'dan," I didn't believe I could get into the story. Luckily, the whole mythology is not complicated, and everything starts to fit together, especially when combination with the adventure where something is always happening, and there is never a moment without one of the main characters fighting, enchanting, or at least flying around a battle or spell. The problem is that beyond the initial visual destruction or emotionally well-crafted soundtrack, there is nothing else. The battles, romances, pacts, and wars lack entertainment value, and the entire First Contact takes place without me starting to root for Lothar and his comrades. On the contrary, the only character who truly interested me and for whom I was rooting for dies in a shockingly routine manner. I wouldn't mind a sequel because with such breadth, there will always be something to develop, but here, there was a lack of soul that would have made this newly discovered universe feel close to me. 50% (08/15/2016)

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. (06/18/2016)

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. (10/03/2016)

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. (06/29/2016)

A hodgepodge, which is not even bad enough to be ridiculously amusing in its unwanted stupidity (albeit flashy visuals or magic neon run style with bloody menacing glances, fingers ominously tapping and you can hear whispering something like "blablagrgrplopplopouch" are dangerously close to it) and at the same time it is not good enough to stand without any objections as a quality genre and not just as a video game B-rate movie pretending to be A-rate. Basically, when panoramas are being shown, the characters shut up and fight in a way that "someone randomly dies", it works well. In other words, yes, it works especially if it's essentially a variation on animations, as we know them directly from Blizzard. Despite how seriously it is taken, it also works in orc scenes, in which this is exactly what the movie Warcraft as a whole was supposed to be. But from the Alliance's point of view, everything is pure hell. In addition, in every second scene, it's more than obvious that the footage has been shortened a lot (some allegedly by up to forty minutes), but paradoxically it is not to the detriment. What is obvious is that the footage was shortened mainly due to removal of piffle. I mean what is like a torture when watching film adaptation of Warcraft. Even so, there is still more piffle than would be appropriate. Overall, it has vast potential, interesting story lines, decent battle scenes, sympathetic uncompromisingness of the main characters, but it also has C-rate dialogs, awkward actors (the real ones look like without life compared CGI orcs), appalling (however based on the original) stylization and gala show of the most original and ridiculous clichés from the department of "fantasy for losers". (06/18/2016)