Movie Review: Warcraft - The Beginning

The game is the game. Warcraft: The Beginning, on the other hand, is barely a movie.

It’s hard to think of a more ominous subtitle to Warcraft than The Beginning. The promise of sequels hasn’t been this unwelcome since Use Your Illusion I, and that at least had “November Rain” on it. Warcraft’s first entry, sadly, features no shirtless Slash solos.

What it does have is lots and lots of fantastical characters endlessly mulling over the costs and ramifications of combat. (The Beginning also speaks to its shapeless screenplay; all-setup, no-payoff.)

Director Duncan Jones and his co-writer Charles Leavitt have taken the ‘craft’ part of the title perhaps a tad too seriously. What should have been a rollicking action movie, differentiated from the pack by sequences of savvy battle stratagem, is instead weighed down by inaction, or straight up passivity, by its heroes. Not one but two soldiers devise genius plans that involve them purposefully dying in a fight. Yeah, that’ll show ‘em.

Game of Thrones traffics in similar hand-wringing over wartime minutiae, though it’s benefited by featuring a cast of canny political operators who are frequently at the mercy of the show’s legitimately shocking twists. (Also: increasingly equal-op nudity.)

You may be shocked to learn that Warcraft, based on the much-obsessed over video game, is not quite as shrewd a political satire. It’s not even a fitting follow-up to Jones’ previous sci-fi parables, Moon and Source Code. A few throwaway, winking jokes aside, Warcraft is as generic and dead-eyed as most other overcooked CGI fests born of ill-suited material. Some games should stay games. (That said, the producers, eyeing the $US156 million Warcraft made in China – where there are 10 million players - over one weekend, have a pretty good argument for adapting it nonetheless.)

The baffling plot, should you be so compelled to read on, centers on the imminent skirmish between the humans of Azeroth and the interdimensional orcs who just dropped in to escape their own dying planet.

King Wrynn (Dominic Cooper) and Lady Wrynn (Ruth Negga) call on military commander Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmel) and reclusive mage Medivh (Ben Foster, going HAM; we'd expect nothing less) to evaluate the threat of further invasion and see if the option of peace is on the table.

They’re aided by Garona (Paula Patton), a hybrid rescued from a life of servitude under evil orc overlord Gul’dan (Daniel Wu). Patton, once married to Robin Thicke and recently wrapped on the Adam Sandler Netflix comedy The Do-Over, knows all about escaping shackles.

Meanwhile, honourable orc chieftain Durotan (Toby Kebbell) plots against his own leader to save his tribe from Gul’dan’s clutches. Kebbell, Wu and the rest of the actors playing orcs (including Clancy Brown), can barely be distinguished through their motion-capture performances and heavily-distorted voices. Not willing to make them look quite as ugly as their Lord of the Rings counterparts, the character designers settle on orcs that resemble Ron Perlman gone very wrong.

Needless to say, all of this is very boring, when not downright incomprehensible, and the climactic melees are merely a collision of indistinguishable pixels. One-on-one fights, in contrast, feel like ‘boss’ battles, which will come as great comfort to gamers who love cut scenes wherein they cannot participate.

The performances never stray into the realm of being actively bad, and that’s some relief; however, the mere presence of the too-good-for-this Patton (struggling to speak already absurd dialogue with unfortunate dental prosthetics, dressed in slave-girl attire) is a bummer. Sure, she’s now anchoring a blockbuster franchise. But did the Hollywood overlords have to make it this blockbuster franchise?

2/5

In cinemas now. Rated M for fantasy violence.