The best video game movie ever, but that isn't saying much

Rating: 7/10 (26 May 2016)

Let me start off by saying that i am long time fan of warcraft, i used to play warcraft I back in first grade, and i still play WoW to this day, i read almost every book, i know almost every single story element, so it's safe to say i was very invested in the film's success
So when the final product finally came i was a bit disappointed, and i also wasn't, the film could be a lot better and i mean A LOT, but it also tried to do the best it could honestly. Warcraft's story is so dense, with so many characters that it's hard to showcase everything in it in just 2 hours, so the movie feels like a very long game of thrones episode, which is good, but it also feels like we've started off in the middle of season 3 which isn't. If you're not familiar with the universe you might get lost.
The film frantically tries to introduce the myriad of characters with mixed success, sometimes we get a very organic dialogue between durotan and draka(our orc protagonists) where we get their motivations and their characters, and then sometimes we get awkwardly shoehorned in backstories from khadgar, garona and lothar( our human side protagonists) where it feels like history homework instead of actual character building. We keep jumping from place to place so fast that we don't even have time to read the town signs, because it's a huge world and apparently all corners of it have to be introduced right away, it's so obsessed with building a world that sometimes it forgets to make a movie.
Characters don't always get enough breathing room due to how many of them there are and many of them suffer from it, like Ben Foster's Medivh who's painfully underused for such a major role in the story, or Lothar's son who's basically there only to get emotional scenes from Travis Fimmel.
The performances are decent, but none of them are really outstanding, ironically though the orcs managed to get more emotion out of me than the humans despite being entirely CGI, they seemed to fit much more into this world than the humans, and the director and screenwriter seemed to be more interested in them as well, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, we're more familiar with humans than with orcs, because these orcs aren't like any we've seen before, they aren't the mindless evil bad guys of LotR, they're honorable and proud beings who are looking for a new home.
The film does a perfect job depicting the motivations of both sides, and even the different motivations inside the sides, it's not a good vs evil film, it's much more intricate and deep than that, referring back to my Game of Thrones point, it's much more similar to that, no side is wrong and no side is right and the film balances it very well and manages to make us feel bad for losses on both sides, which is something i've never seen a fantasy film do before.
I find it hard to believe though, knowing Duncan Jones, that there isn't an extended version of this where the major flaw of the film (not enough time spent developing the characters) is not "fixed" it feels like a classic case of over editing to meet a certain length cutoff, and so the movie cant really breathe.
But despite all it's flaws it's fun, beautiful(probably the best use of CGI I've ever seen), uses a great mix of comedy and drama, knows when to be serious and when to be light hearted, just like the games. If you're a fan of warcraft you'll probably love it, there's tons of little details and nods to fans in the movie that will just make you squeal with joy when you see them, and if you're not a fan of warcraft you still get a decent fantasy flick, but admittedly you might get lost in the ocean of names and places the movie throws at you. I think it's worth the price of the ticket for sure, even if it is not the saviour of video game movies i hoped it would be, it's a good start.