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| Directed by Duncan Jones Written by Duncan Jones, Charles Leavitt, and Chris Metzen |
Alo Party Peoples.
It can be an enjoyable thing to watch a bad movie fail. To use the most recent example, seeing every short-sighted overly serious grim-n'-gritty decision made with comic book superheroes since the Nineties come home to roost in Batman v Superman was nothing short of cathartic. And there are entire communities built around cult failures like The Room or Birdemic - hell, even Howard the Duck has it's defenders. And there are people that built entire careers around mocking these sorts of failures like Mystery Science Theater 3000 or the folks at Channel Awesome and its ilk.
But no such joys are to be found in Warcraft; too ambitious to be written off as fluff and too serious to be called a farce, it is a tragedy. It's like driving past a car crash caused by drunk newlyweds, it's sad because you can tell that the reason it went wrong was because the people involved were giving it their all in hopes of a brighter future. The devotion from director Duncan Jones that lets all the sets and the armor and the weapons and the magic and the creatures feel cinematically real and aesthetically interesting is the same devotion that smothers the rest of the production and renders it an unwatchable slog. He's clearly a big fan of the Warcraft games, big enough that he thinks that the audience needs to know all of the lore and backstory and proper nouns before they can get to any actual plot. He's made an entire movie out of the stuff that the Lord of the Rings movies wisely confined to the first two minutes so they could get to an actual story - even Tolkien kept most of the more trivial worldbuilding details in the appendix.
The result is a masturbatory deluge of the same pop-fantasy milange that film and television and literature and, yes, games drew from Dungeons and Dragons until the "Hey, this could all almost exist" naturalism of Lord of the Rings took over, played so relentlessly serious that it sucks any and all joy out of the gloriously goofy art design. Sure, that's all World of Warcraft ever was on a story level, but without the ability to interact with it there isn't enough of a story or characters there to engage the audience. Great stories tend to have defined characters at their core, a Gilgamesh or a Hercules or a Sun Wu Kong or a Jesus of Nazareth or a King Arthur or a Hamlet or a Sherlock Holmes or a Huck Finn or a Jay Gatsby or a Holden Caulfield or a Clark Kent or a Frodo Baggins or a Luke Skywalker or a Forrest Gump... you get the idea. They all have defined personalities and motivations and arcs, and that's what let them get ingrained in the popular consciousness. A blank homunculus waiting for the character creation engine to decide their entire being is the exact opposite of that. No school will ever assign even the best Choose Your Own Adventure book to be read by its students. I was bored after two minutes, getting antsy after ten, and by the hour and a half mark I wanted nothing more than to be able to push the Y-button in order to make someone do something interesting.
That kind of dissonance is what's really sad about Warcraft, a movie that walks and talks and acts like it sprung fully formed from the collective dreams of a generation of fantasy fandom shouldn't be able to be this dull. There's surprsingly little warcraft in Warcraft, and even when it does happen it looks like a really expensive Scandinavian heavy metal music video, it's flatly directed and the editing is stale and it rarely gets to happen because the filmmakers were more concerned that we might not get that the magic green vapor that comes from stealing souls from prisoners of war and turns anyone that uses it into a horrific wraith is bad.
The experience of watching Warcraft is like listening to that one friend of yours drone on about the Dungeons and Dragons campaign they hosted last week, you can tell that they're really enthusiastic about it, and you feel compelled to keep listening to be polite, but you have no idea what they're talking about and you wish you could just walk away and join the more interesting conversation about that new song on the radio going on across the room. After decades of video game movies sucking because studios chose stuff that was the interactive version of a movie, or because they stripped away all the offbeat, uniquely video-gamey stuff that made it worth translating to film to begin with, or because they just didn't care, now we have one that sucks because the people involved tried way, way too hard to translate everything to the screen, regardless of whether it made an interesting film. It's a cutscene, and the reason you're able to skip cutscenes in games is so that if you just beat the big boss and you're in the zone and you can't wait to keep going, you can get past the boring short film quickly and get back to the action. Warcraft is that, and I suggest you skip it as such.
Have a nice day,
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 2/5
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