A forgettable flick that's everything I don't particularly like about Warcraft

Rating: 3/10 (16 June 2016)

I can't say I was expecting much from the movie, but I at least anticipated that the CGI would look even better than the cinematics from the campaigns of Blizzard's popular game series. It did not. Maybe the detail and resolution was higher, but if so, it was heightened at the cost of the lively playfulness in the designs of the games. You can either make a movie look realistic or marvelously unreal - this was neither.
The pacing also felt off from the get-go... there was no time to settle with any characters. No time to build a mood. Awkward and predictable dialogue, weird cutting between scenes and unnecessarily many "character - learns - terrible - news - looks - up - to - the - skies - and - goes - "my...God!"-types of shots. It didn't need to have ended up this way, considering how long this project has been underway.
Blizzard have always been very keen on borrowing elements of lore and character design from other fantasy leviathans - Warhammer, LOTR, Starship troopers or whatever it might be, but they always do so thoroughly and with both inspiration and cheekiness. This movie didn't have much of either. It tried, and at times achieved the "charming cheesiness"-level of the Star Wars franchise, but I think I prefer to remember the story of the first invasion of Azeroth the way it was told through the original game series.