An insult to old fans

Rating: 4/10 (16 November 2019)

I cannot like a movie which makes a complete mess out of the official history of Warcraft. I can only compare Blizzard Entertainment's lack of interest with the idea of Peter Jackson refusing to film The Two Towers and skipping from the first movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the third. (To avoid any uncertainties, the Warcraft movie presents the events of the first Warcraft game.) The movie's ending however makes half of the history in the second Warcraft game improbable.
On to the second most frustrating detail. The main antagonist is a tyrant, what would make for a good drama, if only the official story did not present him merely as a schemer. This behavior is forced upon the story, leading to events that were also unimaginable in the official lore, but with no lasting impact. So the movie concentrates on presenting these and the origins of the Dark Portal instead of the actual war. In fact in official history none of the battles from the movie have happened.
The only explanation I can muster for this is that the movie is oriented towards the age group playing World of Warcraft and Blizzard Entertainment considered the original history of Warcraft I to be too tragic for that audience. People who haven't played WoW received flashes of possibly familiar content from the franchise such as brutish orcs and soldiers of Stormwind to get them excited about the game and the rest of the audience, who may have actually grown up on this story may go and hang themselves.
I'm not one to frequently spot poor acting or poor CGI, so except the fact that Lothar looks nothing like his game version, I don't have an opinion on those. The movie gives me a glimmer of hope, that Blizzard will one day realize, that warriors want to be able to see their surroundings, so will not wear shoulder pads that obstruct their vision, but Blackhand's armor-decorations thus far elude logic.
I consider the soundtrack to be about average. I've seen many mediocre movies saved by their soundtrack but Warcraft is not one of them.
So my score would look like this: visuals 8 (at least it's not the kaleidoscope we see in World of Warcraft), acting 6, soundtrack 7 and story 3. The story and acting should weigh more in the final score in my opinion, so the average would be somewhere around 4.