Fun film for Warcraft fans!

Rating: 8/10 (28 May 2016)

Sure, this movie is not a masterpiece. The acting is a little stiff sometimes, some of the dialogue seems a bit forced and the story is a bit contrived and maybe a bit too fast moving sometimes. But goddamn if this isn't Warcraft!
I had the exact amount of lore knowledge to know the characters names but not enough to know what was going to happen to them. I also obviously recognized the world of Azeroth and it was brought beautitifully to life. I was worried the somewhat over-the-top creatures and armors of Warcraft wouldn't translate well to the screen but it really did. The entire movie was a beautiful reference to the Warcraft games, from the polymorph "It lasts about 60 seconds", to the murloc, to the vanilla wow character select music playing in the end it almost made me tear up a bit because I knew this world so well.
As for the actors I thought Travis Fimmel did a decent job as main character Anduin Lothar, he pretty much did his old Ragnar from Vikings rouitine and it worked out pretty well. No actor was distinctly bad but most didn't stand out either, the one I do think stood out was Ben Foster as Medivh who I thought did a splendid job with a lot of monologueing. Also Ben Schnetzer did great as the comic relief-y but ultimately game changing Khadgar.
Finally the special effects, I had heard that the movie looked like a cinematic for one of those shitty strategy phone games and I can kind of see where they're coming from but I thought It looked great for the most part, It might not have looked real all the time but it looked like Warcraft and I liked that. But then again that comes from someone who likes the look of the Hobbit movies. I was wondering how they were going to handle the pretty mundane spell casting of Warcraft "FIREBALL, FIREBALL, FIREBALL" but I was pleasantly surprised when every spell felt impactful and looked really cool (that 160 million dollar budget).
I went into this movie expecting nothing at all. But I was surprised to find a fun and captivating adventure that I would definitely recommend for anyone familiar with the Warcraft universe.