World of Warcraft

[Rendakor]

Is it really? That's even worse; a fucking prequel to a 20 year old game?

[Khaldun]

There is literally no way to make anything narratively interesting out of a game that's a cliche-fest pastiche of things that were already cliches before the game existed. The only possible or imaginable film that could be worth watching is one that starts with the idea that this is a game and runs with it, basically as an absurdist comedy. We follow a young orc as he collects 30 boar livers and sees question marks above the heads of orcs who are just standing around, etc.

[Rendakor]

Following Arthas's journey from Paladin > Death Knight > Lich King could have been a decent CGI action flick; the movie you're describing sounds like Scott Pilgrim 2.0 and I don't think the Warcraft IP is quite silly enough to pull it off.

[01101010]

Don't care about any of the story or any of that noise. I just want to see the world in CGI. I'm sold on just watching the environment...fuck the characters. Still, waiting for Netflix to pick this up.

[angry.bob]

It doesn't matter how good or bad it is, it's still 7 or 8 years too late.

This right here. The perfect release window would have been early in Cata, between it's launch at the first big patch. They also should have focused on Arthas, telling the story of WC3 through WotLK (it could even have been a trilogy: WC3, TFT, then WotLK). For bonus points, work in a deal with Fandango where if you go see the Warcraft movie you get an exclusive pet and/or mount. Then just sit back and enjoy your money hats.

What you said here. I consider the Arthas storyline about the only decent storyline in the franchise and I think it would have been interesting enough to have a shot at being taken seriously by a non-fanboy audience. I could see Hollywood having a problem with the lack of love interests though.

Also, having it made that far back would have let it get some extra energy from the LOTR movies.

[Khaldun]

http://www.indiewire.com/2016/06/warcraft-review-duncan-jones-1201683601/

Getting into "But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" territory with the reviews.

[HaemishM]

It's kind of like beating up on a mute cripple with Down's and cerebral palsy that just got its arms and legs chopped off. Should anyone be expecting anything out of this at all?

[Khaldun]

I love the butthurtery in the comment thread there, though.

[HaemishM]

So much salt.

[MahrinSkel]

http://www.indiewire.com/2016/06/warcraft-review-duncan-jones-1201683601/

Getting into "But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" territory with the reviews.

Presented in garish 3D so vivid that viewers can practically feel the movie losing money in real time, “Warcraft” unfolds as though a Dungeon Master were narrating a very expensive episode of “Drunk History.”

[Merusk]

I stopped in r/wow out of curiosity after reading the above review. The hype there is real and frightening.

Though the above review is perhaps a bit too harsh, it does highlight the exact problem I figured they'd have. The lore is a terrible pastiche of garbage that takes itself far too seriously. Good to see that comes shining-through as he was accurately confused by "noble orcs" who are "intelligent but too dumb to develop shirts" and also "too dumb to recognize evil."  

That's a great legacy of the garbage lore because orcs were originally eeeevil. It wasn't until WC2 we got the "noble orc" trope, and they started patching over the whole, "orcs are just butes out to wreck shit" motivation.

WC1 story from the game - 20min video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsxI1IiKa7g
Yeah, no noble orcs here.

[Paelos]

Hahahahahaha why would anybody who has seen Metzen's stuff not expect him to write about bullshit that takes itself seriously? Hell, I was in college the last time he wrote a half-way passable story arc.

[Rishathra]

http://www.indiewire.com/2016/06/warcraft-review-duncan-jones-1201683601/

Getting into "But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" territory with the reviews.

Honestly, I have trouble fully believing this reviewer, as he got the order of Willow -> LOTR -> Masterpiece Theatre exactly backwards.

[Khaldun]

 

[Teleku]

I stopped in r/wow out of curiosity after reading the above review. The hype there is real and frightening.

Though the above review is perhaps a bit too harsh, it does highlight the exact problem I figured they'd have. The lore is a terrible pastiche of garbage that takes itself far too seriously. Good to see that comes shining-through as he was accurately confused by "noble orcs" who are "intelligent but too dumb to develop shirts" and also "too dumb to recognize evil."  

That's a great legacy of the garbage lore because orcs were originally eeeevil. It wasn't until WC2 we got the "noble orc" trope, and they started patching over the whole, "orcs are just butes out to wreck shit" motivation.

WC1 story from the game - 20min video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsxI1IiKa7g
Yeah, no noble orcs here.

I don't remember the noble Orc thing in WC2 at all.  Pretty sure they were straight evil through that entire thing as well.  I thought it only started in WC3 with Thrall, using the painful excuse that the entire race had been demonically influenced for the last thousand years into being terrible bloodthirsty savages.  But they're totally better now that the humans destroyed their home world.

[MahrinSkel]

In essence, in order for the story of WC1 to make any sense at all, the orcs have to be stupid, or evil, or both. You can finesse that:

1) They are being misled by evil shamans that treat the evil wizard as a God. Evil, but only because they have been corrupted (and can potentially be redeemed).

2) The evil wizard has them under a spell that makes them stupid and obedient.

Trying to make them neither evil nor stupid while still being shock troops for a life-sucking, world-killing evil wizard is incoherent.

--Dave

[Teleku]

This is why we need to oppose China's imperialist expansion into the South China Sea.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-08/-warcraft-has-largest-opening-day-at-china-s-box-office-in-2016

[lamaros]

Hahahahahaha why would anybody who has seen Metzen's stuff not expect him to write about bullshit that takes itself seriously? Hell, I was in college the last time he wrote a half-way passable story arc.

You never went to college?

[satael]

Just saw the movie. I liked it in the way I might like Warcarft 2 cutscenes put together on a Youtube video (alot of it has to do with knowing the "lore"). As a movie it dipped into the Dungeons&Dragons level at some points (especially the golem fight) and I couldn't keep from comparing it to the Vikings tv-series due to the actor playing Lothar (and unfortunately it seemed to lack in most cases when compared to that).
All in all it was kind of entertaining mostly due to being familiar with much of the lore but I kind of wish it had been a tv-series instead of a movie so they'd had more time to develop the plot and characters (even if it meant significantly lower cg budget).

[SurfD]

I kind of agree with satael.  It was pretty awesome as a "what would warcraft look like on the big screen" thing, and did an amazing job of capturing the feel and aesthetic look of the Warcraft Universe.  As a stand alone movie however, it falls a bit flat in that you still need to know a decent chunk of the lore to know what the hell is going on in a few key scenes, because the movie does a terrible job of explaning what is happening.   Probably the biggest gaping hole they had was the whole Medhiv/Sargeras/Guldan connection and the reason the horde ended up pointed at azeroth.  They drop crumbs here and there in the story, but never enough to connect together to get a clear piccture of what is going on. Instead you get a vague "The guardian is corrupted, he somehow led the orcs here", and that is it.  No context or anything.  No details on how he got corrupted, or why he lead the orcs there, he just did. They had the perfect opportunity to do that bit of exposition in one of the scenes (explain the previous guardian / conflict with sargeras / real reason for the invasion) and chose to go with Metaphysical Dark / Light shit instead.   Anyone who knows the lore will have the pieces already to make them fit.  Anyone who doesnt is just going to find that bit of the story confusing with no context to guide it.

I am also a bit annoyed that the Leeroy Jenkins scene appearently didnt make the theatrical cut.

[Lakov_Sanite]

No comedy allowed, this shit must be taken seriously at all times.

[angry.bob]

I saw it with my 9 year old. It was much better than I expected, but still cheesy. My two biggest complaints with it were that the draenei woman was not super-hot with a fake Russian accent and that the dwarves failed to have the Scottish accents that all dwarves are required to have in everything. Gul'dan was super-awesome though.

Other than those two things I thought it was at least as good, if not better than The Force Awakens. Leaps and bounds better than X-Men: Apocalypse.

[Evildrider]

This was a Warcraft movie.  I didn't expect it to be anything spectacular, for what it was though, it wasn't bad.  It wasn't as boring as I felt the new X-Men movie was at least.

[Setanta]

I didn't hate this - in fact, I was entertained. Much more so than Civil war... and I have no idea why.

[Khaldun]

Saw it. It is not the worst movie ever made--the comparison to Battlefield Earth is not at all right. It's watchable. But there is something systematically not right about it. And oddly it feels as if it could have been better.

I think what's off is this:

a) There's no real viewpoint character (or even viewpoint characters)--the action moves around in a way that almost feels like a drunk clinging to street lights as he tries to find his way home. You never stick with anybody long enough to really get a good feeling for them or get a sense of their arc. All the characters feel out of focus, fuzzy, and yet not familiar enough to be comforting cliches.
b) The scale and pacing of the story, despite the occasional invocations of the games by cuts to landscapes and maps, is equally fuzzy. There's a lot of set ups that don't get used, really. Khadgar gets advice from his shadowy friend inside the magical companion cube that seems to be saying, "Get everybody to ally together!" but all he does is fly back, pick up Lothar, and go fight Medivh, whereas the whole set-up of the scene with his spirit guide seems to be saying, "Make an Alliance!" That all happens off-scene at the end of the movie.
c) Nobody likes infodumps but there are a few things that ought to be done to set the stage just a teeny bit for anyone who hasn't played the games--the scene of the bickering council where the dwarves, night elves, Kirin Tor, etc. are all present but really seem incredibly angry at each other and are saying, "defend yourself, humans", etc.? for folks who don't know anything about Warcraft, that must be baffling as all fuck--who are all these guys, are they from other dimensions too, why is everybody all angry, and hey, why *does* everyone on this supposedly happy planet have armies and giant shoulderpads and all that?
d) The human actors (+Garona) have some scenes that are just this side of Dungeons & Dragons/MST3K-ready acting, that feel like everybody's slightly embarrassed, but then suddenly they'll have some scenes that are pretty well-acted and convincing.
e) There's really no overcoming the lol-loreness of some of it. And to some extent that might be part of what hamstrings the script--some of the story beats that might be a good thing for the film might be lost because they're trying to stick too much to the games' convoluted narrative.
f) It's very nearly humorless.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Looks like the conjuring2 made more money opening weekend than this.

[Evildrider]

It's already made over a 100 mil in China though.

[Malakili]

For those who have seen it on the big screen: How do the effects look? Every time I see an ad for this it just looks cheap as hell.

[Khaldun]

It has moments where it looks pretty good and moments where it looks REALLY cheap and bad. The night-elves and dwarves, only seen briefly, look cheap and chintzy as fuck. The orcs sometimes look good, sometimes not. The magical effects that Khadgar and Medivh have around them look good, mostly. The gryphons look good. It's extremely inconsistent.

[Setanta]

Stormwind, Dalaran and Karazan looked spot on. I wish there was more of the latter. The riding wolves were average compared to griffins. Gul'dan was beautifully animated and the rest was up and down.

[Khaldun]

Gul'dan looks good throughout. Generally so does Durotan.

[Tale]

It has moments where it looks pretty good and moments where it looks REALLY cheap and bad.

But that's what Warcraft is. Just when you think it might have a good story, it gets cheap and bad as you're reminded that it sits on the kind of afterthought developers came up with as a plot in the early 1990s, to call something "Orcs and Humans" instead of "Reds and Blues". Gameplay is the only thing that really matters. Making a movie is an indulgence.

[Merusk]

It wasn't as horrible as I expected based on the reviews but it really, really failed to sell why the Orcs would follow Gul'dan at all.

The CGI is going to look terrible in another 3 years, like all heavy-CGI movies that push for realism over style. (The Hobbit is already suffering from this, and these were about that level.) That's part of what the elves and dwarves both suffer from.  Well that and the Eye-glow effect that looks cool in video games doesn't translate well to live-action.

Nice touches for the Warcraft and WoW freaks. My wife noticed that the portals Khadgar and Mediv cast had them use the in-game Hearthstone pose.

I don't remember the noble Orc thing in WC2 at all.  Pretty sure they were straight evil through that entire thing as well.  I thought it only started in WC3 with Thrall, using the painful excuse that the entire race had been demonically influenced for the last thousand years into being terrible bloodthirsty savages.  But they're totally better now that the humans destroyed their home world.

For some reason I thought it started with the WC2 expansion, Beyond the Dark Portal. You see how Ner'zuhl was subjugating the Orcs and using them then abandoned them. I just rewatched the vid on YouTube, though and you're right, they don't give any of the redeeming stuff.  It's all been since WC3 and retconning of the lore after that via Comics, Novels etc. that Metzen's overseen since Roper left.

[Khaldun]

I think the Easter egg we liked the most was the murloc in the foreground in one scene. Could have used more of that kind of stuff.

[Nebu]

My GF took me to this yesterday because she really wanted to see it.  It was SLOW and tough to follow for someone (me) that wasn't a complete WoW lore nerd.  It was entertaining, but too many characters with too little development.  I was yawning, at 4pm, an hour into this.