Great portrait of orcs. And solid launchpad for future films.

Rating: 7/10 (29 May 2016)

Let me preface this by saying that I am probably in the 0.1% when it comes to the lore of Warcraft. I have read at least 6 of the books, played all the strategy games and quite a bit of the world of Warcraft content. Contrary to what I've mostly been hearing, this is NOT a World of Warcraft movie. The story line of Warcraft progresses linearly, WarcraftWarcraft 2Warcraft 3 The frozen throneWorld of WarcraftExpansions. This movie ONLY includes story line content from the first Warcraft, indeed none of the characters should be recognizable to a WOW fan (except the baby, if you know who that is). Warcraft has always been a very character centered story, indeed nothing happens without a character leading the action, there is no such thing as X race doing Y. Instead it is character Z leading a portion of race X to do Y. As such the movie should be judged on how well it developed its characters. On the positive side I thought the orcs were very well developed, not only do we empathize with Durotan but we also get a sense of the cultural attitudes that the orcs have, with many chieftains and constant fighting between the clans. As such the orcs are successfully portrayed as an honor culture instead of just purely barbaric, to me this is a great success and something that has never been done on screen before. Warcraft to me has established a universe that has much more potential than the Lord of the Rings if only because of the empathy one feels for both sides. On the negative side I thought the humans were a little rushed. Khadgar, the young apprentice mage had rather unnatural dialogue and the actor playing him felt a bit off at times. Lothar was also slightly underdeveloped, perhaps a little more on his relationships should have been done, especially with his son.
Visual effects wise I thought the movie was amazing, the spells are truly epic and there is a real sense of scale to be felt.
This is not the fantastic movie I was hoping for but it has no large overarching faults, and within the time limit it probably achieves as much as it could have, it is only a shame that it wasn't longer so that it can properly hit all on the tonal cords. However with the universe established, there is much less world building to be done for the sequels and I am craving for the legendary characters to emerge.