Article by: Anthony Florez
I’ll say this right out of the gate: Warcraft is good movie. Period. It has a million things working against it and it’s not that it’s good in spite of those things, it’s just objectively good and I’ll make my case forthwith. First a little history. Yes, I have played World of Warcraft but not because I wanted to. About five years ago when I first moved to Austin, Texas the first job that I found was as a GM at the Blizzard office and I loved it. Not because I was a fanboy or because it paid well (it didn’t) but because of how passionate and enthusiastic the WoW community is. I literally had to play the game and spend hours studying it just to understand what the hell anyone was ever talking about but once I did I had a blast helping people (and occasionally dropping the banhammer). I never exactly fell in love with the game itself, despite its depth, mostly because I hate interacting with other people while actually playing it and at a certain point you kind of have to. Once my tenure was up and I moved on to another job but I never lost the appreciation I had for how weird and compelling the community is.
Based on the trailers for Warcraft my expectations were, well. Not good. Rock bottom, actually. In fact, I was stunned that Duncan Jones had finally seemed to misstep, his earlier two films Source Code and Moon are imperfect gems that nobody saw. But the trailers were all kinds of generic CGI blah and awful awful dialogue so cliche that my brain did that record skipping thing that you kids know about now thanks to hipsters bringing back record players. And a lot of the criticism leveled against the film targets those things specifically and they aren’t wrong at all, just misdirected. This is a very big universe and there is a lot of exposition to get through, so of course that’s going be there for audiences not familiar with the source material. I’ve gotten the impression that that criticism has been built in, like a knee-jerk reaction, and the pop culture community has been in a race to have those expectations fulfilled in order to be the first ones to shout about how right they were. And the direct result of that is missing out on what’s good about Warcaft, what really works. For example, the rich, complex, racially diverse world, the strong female characters, and the fantastic character design.
There is a lot of CGI in this movie, half the characters are entirely computer generated but what has been mostly left out is how exceptional that CGI is. The motion capture and emotional range of characters like Durotan the Orc and his pregnant wife are affecting and vivid and sympathetic. The combat is bone-crunching and violent, the world incredibly detailed and this is the thing that everyone seems to have taken for granted: this is hardcore fantasy. It’s elves and wizards and giant birds that you can ride around and it’s awesome. I’m normally not one to emphasize spectacle over substance but here I absolutely don’t have to because the movie has both.
As was hinted at in the trailer all the Orcs aren’t the bad guys, they are written with their own motivations and pathos and all the humans aren’t just the good guys. And, this is going to get slightly spoilery, I don’t know that the good guys exactly won the day. I went in expecting, essentially, Star Wars, if not in a groundbreaking way at least in a compartmentalized, beginning-middle-end fashion with the potential for continued adventures left open. This is the standard formula for a new potential tentpole franchise but what I got was closer to the Empire Strikes Back, which is ballsy as hell and what I really enjoyed about the film. Maybe I’m a little biased because I’m somewhat familiar with the lore but to be honest, I couldn’t remember most of it and once I stopped trying to I was able to actually get caught up in the story. And it’s a good story that is open ended on both sides and chock full of unanswered questions. Here’s a movie that doesn’t follow the studio approved formula for a blockbuster, it’s off-beat and has a weird rhythm and that’s a good thing. And for the missing details about the larger world, I’ll use Star Wars again, as an example. How much more interesting was that universe before the prequels and the books and the television shows? Before Vader had an origin story and Luke was just a random kid from some shithole of a planet; so much was left out that you wanted to go to that place and populate it with your imagination, the way a good book does.
So as I read the reviews for Warcraft one thing seemed to be consistent between all the negative ones and that was a kind of enthusiasm. Critics are really teeing off on this movie, almost like they are having fun doing it and that’s what raised my suspicions in the first place and compelled me to go see it myself. According to the Rotten Tomatoes critical score of 26% Batman 5 Superman: Dutch Oven of Justice is objectively a superior film which is Utter. Fucking. Horseshit. There are definitely things that could have been improved, the casting felt a little strange to me in some places (what made for TV Disney movie did Ben Schnetzer crawl out from the supporting cast of?) and Ruth Negga and Callum Keith Rennie were criminally underutilized among others. But when the film works, it really works. Like I said earlier, I don’t know that the good guys really saved the day and when they weren’t there in time I was surprised at how affected I was and how much I wanted to see more.
The bottom line is this: if you go into this movie expecting it to suck, you’re going to find things about it that suck. They are there, I’m not denying that. The same thing is going to happen if you go on a date with the same attitude and all I’m saying is that if you try to appreciate the experience for what it is, i.e. epic in it’s absolute love of all things fantasy, you actually might get lucky. And if you are an enthusiastic or even casual lover of the fantasy genre, you really will. Of course, only in the metaphorical sense. HAHAHAHA! Epic nerd burn! HAHahaaa–……. I saw this film alone.