It does the games justice

Rating: 6/10 (26 May 2016)

Making a movie based on a video game is a pretty bold move, because a lot can go wrong. A game's success can trigger movie makers to create half-assed products, that only serve cash grabbing and on the other side games tend to lack enough substance to make good movies. Luckily for Warcraft the latter isn't it's case and given to the right director and writers it can become quite a quality product. Also luckily for the fans, that's exactly what happened. First of all the movie absolutely achieved to immerse me in it's fantasy world. The presentation was beautiful and fitting to it's source material. It also deserves praise for it's great CGI (which happens rarely). When battles happened I genuinely felt excited. Compared to the Hobbit trilogy (as much as I dislike to bash on one of my favourite movie makers) they didn't feel like over the top CGI-dance routines. They had risk and intensity. Though I must admit, that a certain character did have a bit too much plot armor. As far as the story goes; it was overall interesting. I enjoyed the double perspective and world building elements. There were however problems in the plot transitioning. The exposition and early phases of the movie are quite lacking. It's all too fast paced and certain points, that should have been explained more thoroughly earlier only got to me after they kept bringing them up as the plot progressed. The acting was pretty good and you could sense some dedication within the portrayals of the characters. While the story was not too heavily character driven, they did deliver in being somewhat interesting to stick around with. Warcraft may not be the best fantasy film that came out, it however knows what it wants to be and gives it's fans, what they wanted to see. If you're not a Warcraft fan, you will likely have some trouble immersing yourself in this world at the get go, maybe it won't happen at all, but even then I find you could get some fun out of the impressive (while cartoon-y) CGI and the exciting action scenes.