AMAZING spectacle but seriously flawed storytelling

Rating: 6/10 (28 May 2016)

As a Warcraft fan since 1995 who has closely followed the development of this movie over the last year.
POSITIVES
The CGI is SUPERB.
The action is GREAT. Some of the best I've ever seen.
The cinematography is GREAT, many individual shots are very effective.
The props are fine.
The acting is mostly fine.
NEGATIVES
Lousy writing
Lousy editing
VERDICT:
Storytelling: 3/10
Spectacle: 10/10
Overall: 6/10
CRITIQUE: There are plenty of sequences that are compelling but other sequences have some of the most ham-fisted dialog I have ever seen. Like a soap opera, like a 12 year old wrote it, really cringeworthy Star Wars prequel level stuff. There's a lot of it and it's frankly embarrassing to watch. It's told/edited in a very clumsy and confusing way. Some parts make very little sense. There is nothing wrong with the story per se. Sure it's simple but simple stories can be good if they are properly focused and well presented. Warcraft isn't. It fails to explain/introduce some things that are important while at other times it repeats obvious and irrelevant points several times over that could have been conveyed in more subtle ways. "Yeah, I get it" scenes.
But here's the strange thing: the spectacle is so good that it's worth seeing. It's so good I actually want to go see it again, in 2D this time, maybe even more than once. I think something like X-Men Apocalypse is a better "film", but it isn't spectacular in the way Warcraft is. Same with The Jungle Book, which I'd rate 9/10 but I feel no need or desire to see it again, but I do with Warcraft. I'll just have to cringe through a lot of it.
If they make a sequel, which I hope, I hope they will have confidence in the movie and give it a longer running time so they can tell a fully developed story. But they really, really need to improve the crappy writing and editing. If they had done a competent job with that this would have been a truly great movie because everything else about it is good.
I do think a director's cut could significantly improve the film. This isn't just speculation, I know they have cut good scenes because there was footage that leaked a year ago from San Diego Comic Con and there were several sequences just in that 4 minute clip that are not in the movie:
These are the kind of "slow" establishing scenes the movie desperately needed more of, because these characters are hardly introduced. We haven't gotten to really know the characters before they start doing stuff so we don't care.
A director's cut with those and other scenes restored would be a significantly better movie.