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Rating:
Much lies in expectations. As far as I am concerned, knowing the director's skill and vaguely remembering the vastness of the narrative material of the available video games, I was hoping for something better. Warcraft may be fine only for those looking for coarse and easy entertainment; when attempting a comparison with other high-level epic-fantasy films, one immediately realizes the poor value of Duncan Jones' work.
The epic of Warcraft does not work, primarily due to the writing, afflicted by two opposing problems. On one hand, the script is too simple, lacking lexical depth: war is treated as if it were a game with toy soldiers, or (what a coincidence) a real-time strategy video game. On the other hand, in several passages, the dialogues wrap around themselves due to the quantity of exotic, not to say bizarre, names of characters, places, magic, mysterious objects, etc. At times it descends into gibberish.
The film does not fully work even visually: the special effects are astonishing but unevenly distributed. We thus have magnificent orcs or CGI landscapes alternating with blatantly cost-saving sequences, set in spartan interiors, or worse yet, armors, crowns, and jewels that are evidently made of plastic. The magnificence of some orcs clashes with the aesthetic of the human king, embarrassing in his ugly plastic armor. The unbalanced resource management is also evident in the quantity of characters on screen: the armies are dense only when realized by computer; when many extras are needed, the numbers clearly decrease.
The characters themselves are all or almost two-dimensional, but not much more was expected. If anything, it is the casting that is somewhat disappointing. The faces of Lothar (Travis Fimmel) and Garona (Paula Patton) are convincing, but others are completely devoid of charisma, particularly the king and the apprentice guardian. Even the management of the characters is unconvincing: Lothar is infinitely more charismatic than his king, there is no comparison. The Horde hierarchies are better, but after Durotan's choice, it becomes a bit difficult to clearly understand who stands with whom.
The film's strengths eventually prove to be flawed. I am referring to the presence of two opposing points of view, that of humans and that of orcs; the initial complexity quickly becomes trivialized into a fight of good vs. evil, from the moment Durotan starts opposing Guldan and the use of witchcraft. Another appreciable element is the structuring of the story: it remains one of the more solid elements, with some not-bad twists and an interesting love story, but in the adrenaline-filled finale, it descends into a predictable accumulation of war sequences and various actions, characterized by a certain tendency to build rather convoluted, game-like mechanisms. The battle of Lothar and the apprentice sorcerer against a strong demonic enemy, for example, resolves in an almost ridiculous way: everything banks on spectacle, but the soul is lacking. Think of Gandalf: in three films he doesn’t cast a single thunderbolt; yet he has a credibility a thousand times superior to the wizards of this Warcraft.
The choice to heavily refer to the video game aesthetic is evident mainly in the directorial style adopted to narrate the battle events: they are often filmed from above, from very far away, even shifting to different battle locations in leaps in one transition. This choice proves wrong: an aspect is emulated that, on a cinematic level, does not pay off. The battles, therefore, end up being entirely chaotic, only to resolve suddenly in a linear way. Better is the reference to the necessity of a lot of time needed by wizards to cast their spells.
Returning to the plot, the many premises result in few consequences; the outcomes are very minimal, it is truly a beginning without great developments. One easily intuits the intention to produce a long, very long saga. As for the style, Jones does not manage to leave his mark strongly on the sequences. It follows a purely emphatic trend, with epic music constantly supporting the images. The style is distinctly uninteresting also for the way violence is shown, depriving it of drama and horrific charge, sugarcoating it.
[This review has also been published on my blog]
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