Badcraft

Rating: 4/10 (4 September 2017)

Unfortunately I've lost all hope that someday we may have a good movie based on video games. In favor: excellent cinematography, very credible CGI during most of the film and well made and choreographed battles and fights. A treat for the eyes. Against: everything else. The mythology of Warcraft is so vast that it becomes overwhelming to want to condense everything into just a 2 hour movie, which is the main reason why everything else has failed. For those who played the games and read the books this might not be a problem, but whoever comes to this movie from scratch can be a little confusing at first, though not discouraging for the film experience. Introducing the Orcs as characters with history and motivations alongside with Humans was also a bad decision, because we have so many characters that it becomes impossible to get involved with them, being that when they die or something tragic happens the viewer does not care because they were not characterized and developed enough to relate emotionally to them. The casting of the actors does not seem to me to have been well done, as most of them do not convey any charisma (perhaps with the surprising exception of Paula Patton who plays Garona, an half-breed Orc - and here comes the first plot hole: if she came from a world completely dominated by Orcs, she is half- Orc half-what? Maybe in a sequel we'll have the answer).
The idea of this film would work better if it were much longer, or better still, as two films, one from the point of view of Humans and another from the point of view of Orcs. That said, the movie entertains, and really had potential to be something remarkable, and it's a shame that it has not reached that potential that the Warcraft universe deserves. But we should already be accustomed to it, that every video-game-based movie sucks.