Warcraft – Film Review

Director: Duncan Jones
Writers: Duncan Jones (screenplay), Charles Leavitt (screenplay)
Stars: Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Ben Foster

The Orc planet is dying but their druid has found a solution. He has created a portal that can transport them to another world. There is one problem with this, his magic needs life as its energy and they do not have enough to transfer the full Orc population. They intend to travel to their new planet and use the life energy there to transfer the rest of the Orcs. Are you still with me?

This is based on the Warcraft video game series and novels set in the world of Azeroth. The film is squarely aimed at filling the void in the market left by the recent departure of the Hobbit/ LOTR series and creates a very similar world, with a slightly stronger emphasis on the power of good (blue) and bad (green) magic. The Orcs come to the planet in search of food, water and most of all, some very good dentists!

The film is aimed at fans of the video game and teenage boys. As such, it’s never going to receive much praise from the critics. The most unusual thing is that Duncan Jones is at the helm, son of David Bowie and director of one of the best sci-fi films of recent years in Moon (2009). It is his first crack at a big budget monster such as this, but really I had him marked out as someone who would go in a whole different direction. You can’t help but feel a little disappointed by this and his name as been erased from my list of young directors to watch!

The use of CGI is hugely excessive and at times you feel like you’re watching the loading sequence of a computer game. This is all done as an attempt to create something epic in nature but in truth it is at the cost of its humanity. The characters feel quite hollow and you don’t flinch for a second when they are dispatched in whatever unlikely fashion. Having said all this, while I did enter the cinema with very low expectations, it was slightly better than anticipated. I was less bored by it than I expected to be! Jones attempts to weave a complex story and something suitably epic in nature. It is not as vacuous as many computer game adaptations and as an attempt to set up a new series of films, it has probably done enough to justify another outing.