League of Dota

Rating: 4/10 (12 June 2016)

Video game based movies have a pretty bad track record and has yet to have an adaptation that is critically acclaimed. Is Duncan James' Warcraft: the Beginning the film to end that bad streak? Sadly not as the film has been panned by critics and doesn't get a particularly good review right here either.
The visual effects in this film are OK. The CGI looks very similar to Blizzard's cinematic adverts for the World of Warcraft games. The effects are a focus for this film as the fantasy genre demands lots of practical and visual effects for it to work. Although impressing in some shots, the special effects look really fake in other scenes, taking the wow factor out of the World Of Warcraft.
The acting is fairly poor. Travis Fimmel's, Paula Patton's, Domonic Cooper's and Ben Foster's performances bring nothing good to the film and their characters are ultimately uninteresting. The film also brings in some kind of young mage who I think is only there to explain to the other characters and the audience whats going on, both in Technical jargon followed by layman's terms. The lack of care I felt towards the films characters is not solely down to the acting as the script doesn't help them much either, not really giving the actors much to work with to some extent. There were attempts to bring a personal touch to these characters such as Lothar's son and Garona's backstory told at a fire place, but these are a too brief to bring any real impact.
The films plot to me felt like you needed to have some knowledge of the realm of Azeroth to which the film is set. Being a noob of the WoW world I only understood the plot at its most basic level. The Orc's ruthless dictator steals the souls of people as a source of energy to open up a portal so the orcs can take over the human world. Then generic heroic man leads humans to stop this threat. This feels like a movie made for the fans of the game which it should be. So for fans of the WOW games this is a must see but for novices like myself, maybe not.
Overall, Warcraft is an OK movie but is one that you should go in with some knowledge of the game if you want to understand the film better. This is sadly not the film to break the video game to movie adaptation curse. Hopefully the Assassin's Creed movie fairs better. Fingers crossed because I love me some Assassin's Creed.