Wow

Rating: 7/10 (8 June 2016)

It's the best video game adaptation ever made! Although, let's face it, this is faint praise. More importantly – and I suspect this was director Duncan Jones's mission statement – it's a good film. Not perfect, but better than the wham bam trailers would have us expect, and nothing like those Rotten Tomatoes numbers.
Most will have heard of World of Warcraft, the western world's most successful massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. Although Jones's movie actually returns to 1994, to the original game, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, as its starting point.
So, do I review this adaptation as a layman or a fan? I fall somewhere in-between: I've played Warcraft 3 and vanilla WoW, but then my knowledge falls away. Still, I know a Murloc warble when I hear it, and I understand the significance of the name Durotan.
Durotan (Toby Kebbell) is an orc chief of the Frostwolf Clan. His homeworld Draenor is dying, and his leader, Gul'dan (Daniel Wu), is farming the souls of the indigenous Draenei in order to create a portal to Azeroth, where he intends to migrate his Horde and settle in the new world. Trouble is, Azeroth is already home to humankind (and elves and other species we briefly glimpse).
The human military force in Azeroth is led by Lothar (Travis Fimmel), a powerful warrior who joins forces with the mage named Medivh (Ben Foster) and mage-apprentice Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer) to fight the Horde and close the portal. But Durotan is equally sceptical about Gul'dan's crusade, and he is seeking to halt the mighty warlock via orcish mutiny. When the humans capture the half- orc Garona (Paula Patton), she becomes the bridge between Lothar and Durotan. But will it be enough to prevent Gul'dan from completing his apocalyptic plan?
The themes are broad and basic but laudable. Displaced people from a dying land escaping to a new place and a new culture? There are obvious parallels with modern migration struggles. But Jones targets a more nuanced dramatic core, focusing upon those individuals seeking common ground – who happen to be the proudest and arguably truest of each tribe.
There's a hint of The Hobbit in the bright-but-grounded style of the movie. But the similarity ends there, because while Peter Jackson stretched a lot of content thinly across nearly nine hours, Jones and his co-writers pack more significant incident into two. I also feel that Jones has done a better job of integrating practical sets and props with CG environments.
The special effects are something special, particularly during the orc scenes. I haven't seen such weight and clarity in CGI since Pacific Rim. While Warcraft doesn't seek to mimic the games' almost cartoony aesthetic it is evidently a work of great care and affection for the larger-than-life source material.
On the performance front, Fimmel essentially reprises his roguish Vikings role as the charismatic Lothar. Patton's Garona plays a key part as the go-between for the clashing factions. I especially enjoyed her non-nonsense attitude to mating. Gul'dan is a wonderfully grotesque creation whose Fel power has left him utterly indifferent to the plight of the common man. There's a fantastically 12A-pushing scene in which he idly sucks the soul from a human captive like he's toking on a crack pipe. But it's Kebbell who steals the show. He lives and breathes the hulking Durotan – with this role and Apes' Koba, I wonder if we have a successor to Andy Serkis in the motion capture maestro stakes.
The focus on characters and by extension themes is what elevates Warcraft above standard fantasy fare. Even when, in the final battle, the intimate drama threatens to be swamped by spectacle, Jones has the sense to give us emotional beats: pay-offs for the patient character-building of the first two acts.
Warcraft has been hugely underrated by professional critics so far. The temptation is to rally against this perceived injustice. But let's reach for some objectivity: Warcraft is a flawed film. There's some seriously clunky dialogue, as per the need for exposition in a fantasy universe that will be all-new to many in the audience. And a sub- plot about Lothar's son never really resonates, perhaps because there are so many characters vying for real estate in the relatively brief running time.
Warcraft's chief flaw may be its subtitle. It means we're left with a dangerously inconclusive ending. How much it's possible to enjoy the final act of this film depends largely on whether "The Beginning" is suitably confident or hopelessly optimistic.
Knock off a star if your interest in Warcraft doesn't extend beyond one particularly amusing South Park episode – you're still in for a solid, enjoyable adventure story, somewhat old-fashioned in tone; and which also, in an era of turgid monstrosities, feels unusually brisk. For the fans, this is a no-brainer which happens to have some brains to go with its brawn.