Entertaining, albeit a bit messy, watch

Rating: 7/10 (6 August 2016)

Warcraft is a video game adaptation of the popular game series of the same name. In order to escape their dying world, the orcs invade the world of Azeroth, while the inhabitants of that world, namely the humans, try to stop their efforts. Now I have never played World of Warcraft or any other game in the franchise except for Warcraft 3, and that too only online matches with my friends, meaning I have little to no knowledge about this universe, its lore, its characters etc. Having said that, I was still interested in watching this movie as I just love fantasy worlds and this looked like another good one.
From the very first scene to the very last, this movie was RUSHED AS HELL. There was literally no breathing room, none at all. This is the core reason for all of my problems with the movie. It felt like they had the material to make two movies, or even a trilogy, but crammed it all into one 2 hour long movie. The movie just went from scene to scene, locations to location, without giving you time to take it all in. This also resulted in little to no development for majority of the characters. There was also a super rushed forced romance in the movie. And the movie just ends. No proper resolution. Seriously, it feels like they just butchered a 3 hour movie to make it shorter. I hope there is an extended Bluray version or something.
Keeping the extremely fast pace in mind, the movie was somehow still entertaining. I wanted to know more about the world, the characters, the races and what have you. The story was straightforward with some interesting characters. Surprisingly, the main Orc, Duratan, was the one who had the most depth and emotion in the entire movie. This was not only thanks to a good performance, but also thanks to some amazing motion capture work. The facial animations and detail was almost on Dawn of the planet of the apes level, which really brought not only Duratan, but other orcs to life, whether it be Guldan: the big baddie or Duratan's wife.
This brings me to the overall CGI work. The orcs, as stated above, looked amazing. Huge, fierce, powerful beings. Their fights had impact and you really got the feeling that humans were puny little things in front of them. The locations looked great as well. The different landscapes and cities were quite beautiful at times. However, CGI was inconsistent. The creatures/animals didn't look as good, and at times, when there were both live humans and CGI orcs and environments in the mix, things did get too green-screen-ey.
The action was good and entertaining. It wasn't anything outstanding, something I was expecting for some reason ( :p ), but it was good enough that you get thrill out of it. I wish there were more Orc vs Orc brawls cause that looked AWESOME!! The magic stuff was great. The effects, the power and feel, it really made magic a force to fear, and I loved it. Soundtrack was good enough with some really good tracks on the orcs side.
Coming back to the characters, while Duratan was great, most of the humans were really hard to care for. This again can be attributed to the fact none of them got any proper time for development. BUT, some of the acting was bad too. Stilted and lifeless. And with movie being so rushed, sometimes characters just pop out, even near the end for furthering the plot, making things more messy.
Still, surprisingly enough, it was an entertaining watch, even if a messy one. The 2 hours flew by. If it wasn't such a rushed job, this could have been a great fantasy action movie and the general audience would have liked it more. As for the fans, I get why they like it more as if you know the ton of lore already, the rushed job won't have a big effect. My recommendation is that it is worth a try if you like fantasy worlds. There are things to appreciate in the movie and can be a good time for many. Seeing the box office, I don't think we'll get a sequel but I really hope they do make one. I wanna see more of this world.
7/10