Warcraft on the big screen is a mess

Rating: 5/10 (30 May 2016)

I'm a Warcraft fan. I've played every single Warcraft game except Warcraft 1.
Warcraft's world is filled with magic, wars and super hero-like characters. The movie tries to adapt a big, convoluted story with ~10 main characters in movie with a run time of 2 hours. Clunky writing, bad pacing and no deep story lines makes Warcraft look more like Dungeons and Dragons than Lord of the Rings.
The movie is pretty (granted, I watched it in 3D so my perception might be off), the orcs look great and so does the magic. One of the main developers of Warcraft once said that the "world" of Warcraft, is its strongest asset, so one big question is why they never explored it more. The movie overall takes place on a battlefield, in a city and a tower, with no hints of how big the world is, what other exotic races and beasts there are, what the humans and orcs traditions are like or how they generally live. Backstory to the two races and their kingdoms would've really helped.
The biggest problem of the movie, is that it tries to make you care for a vast number of characters under such a short run time. Cutting the characters in half would've made the movie a good (or great) one, instead of a mediocre one. The viewer only gets to know one or two, the rest are very forgettable with no deep story lines attached to them. The problem with this is that the movie thinks you do care about the whole cast, so moments that could've been very emotional falls extremely flat.
If the movie focused more on maybe 4 characters instead of 10, it would've worked a lot better and its my main gripe with the movie. None of the characters are fleshed out enough but it still plays on the fact that maybe you care about them, which you don't.
Compare it to LoTR, the first movie really only focuses on Frodo, Sam and Gandalf, and somewhat Aragorn. It fleshes out 3 characters really well and when the events on the bridge of Khazad-Dûm happens, you really feel for them - you might've even cried. Replace Gandalf with someones less fleshed out, maybe Galadriel. If she died on the Bridge, would anyone even care?
In Warcraft, every single character is Galadriel.