This movie deserved better in many ways. The real problem lied within the writing. Warcraft is a household name ever since its successful runs of Realtime Strategy games, while hitting everyone with an MMORPG that is still successful during the time of writing this article. The lore was already enormous, but once World of Warcraft came out, the storyline was wide and expanding into more intimately detailed world building. This was one of the real problems when it came to making this franchise into a movie.
The film was a little more ambitious than it should have been. It tried to tell the story while shoving as much lore and backstory of the world at the audience as they could. The exposition dumps and overly complicated conversations happened far too often in this movie. The actors are fine, especially when it comes to the orcs. The orcs have a very compelling story, in fact, they were the more sympathetic plotline rather than the royally political human plot. The fact that the orcs were twice the size of the humans also painted a very inconsistant picture when it comes to combat ranking characters.
The fighting is a little too embellished as well. Battles seem to take long amounts of time without a great deal happening. The use of CGI for magic and creatures was very well integrated into the movie. This became part of its downfall, as the money spent on this movie gave it the mantle of one of the highest grossing movies of the year, and still being considered a failure because the budget was so far inflated.
A lower budget with a smaller scope would have helped this movie immensely. This is something that should have been built up to and then fleshed out over a longer period of time. Keeping the story and the setting simple could have given them a way to introduce new characters in a new world without having to make the audience think that they're being assigned homework. The story of Lothar was an interesting one to tell, but not enough to justify the budget and the level of detail. This should have looked further back to the story of the first Warcraft game and just built up to a much larger conflict. The war in the movie we get just makes us wish they went solely with the orcs rather than showing us how a troll is gaining favor for a king in the human plot.
There was some good material here for hardcore Warcraft fans, but it just didn't translate into dollars for everyone else. The fighting is lackluster and the story is just so bloated, it feels like they wanted to cram an entire season of a TV series into one film. You know, like what they did to the Last Airbender. Let's just be happy that they actually did a better job on the CGI and acting than that. The wasted potential of Warcraft as a new medium is a shame. This story could have gone somewhere, but it was too much, too fast.
Something like this could work in a much longer term. An HBO series with a bit better of a plan with the CGI could have very easily worked. If they had a good plan for how the lore plays out, this could have had a lot more room to breathe. The storyline of the games could have easily been translated into a TV series and we could have gotten a lot more time to meet other races like the Night Elves or the Pandarians. That's right, I want to see the drunken panda fighter. Even Frozen Throne in Warcraft 3 was able to add him into the story in some small way. Either way, it's a shame this didn't work and we can only hope they'll have another go at it, hopefully with more focus on story and less on trying to build the entire world in one go. Virtua Bloodlust!
