Visually stunning, stunted performance

Rating: 6/10 (14 June 2016)

Video Review: https://youtu.be/PYSjuDFN15A
Warcraft, starring Travis Fimmel and Paula Patton. This is the new movie from director Duncan Jones, and is based off of the worldwide video game phenomenon; World of Warcraft. Let's jump right in.
With Warcraft, I didn't quite know what to expect. I knew of the games of course but never played anyone in particular. I was worried that not knowing the backstory might make the movie confusing but this film actually does a great job of letting you know the characters and the world at a gradual pace. Whether or not I find these characters good at all is another story but we'll get to that.
Warcraft looks amazing. Duncan Jones has proved from previous films like Moon and Source Code that he can make a sharp looking movie. With that, I was interested that he decided to do Warcraft, something so different from the films he's directed so far. This movie is on a bigger scale than his other films and he does a great job of bringing the Warcraft world to life. The motion capture CGI for the orcs looked great, the sets and CGI backgrounds are expansive and the overall style gave the movie a very cool look and feel.
Now speaking of orcs, their characters were the ones I felt to be the most interesting as they had the best emotional core to them. Travis Fimmel plays Lothbar, our hero on the human's side and I just didn't care for him much. His performance wasn't lacking anything but I just felt he was a boiled down version of every major action movie hero of the past 5 years. Paula Patton is a half breed orc and I was on the fence about her in the whole film. She had a lot of good lines and great delivery but then had scenes where she'd just grunt a lot. Ben Schnetzer played Khadgar, a sorcerer who to me seemed very flat and I kinda wanted him to get hit in the face with one of the orcs hammers for his deadpan performance.
The combat of Warcraft was very impressive to see on the big screen although it almost feels like it's the same fight scene each time. Most of the fights are clan vs clan and lacks variety, as a result the movie lacks those stand out bad-ass moments. The only great 1v1 fight we had comes in the last act of the movie and was a nice treat for fans but is never followed up with a comparable sequence. The ending is also anti-climatic as the final battle scene is pretty lackluster after a boring second act.
Overall this movie does a good job of showing and introducing us to the World of Warcraft. The characters are interesting, the CGI was very impressive and I'm interested to see how the second one turns out as this one didn't quite knock it out of the park but it at least got to second base. I'm giving Warcraft 6 out of 10.