Good but...

Rating: 8/10 (27 September 2016)

Despite having played World of Warcraft since vanilla days I'm not one of those fanboys who is going to give this a perfect 10/10 full of praises, because it's not a perfect 10/10.
Without giving away the plot if I can the movie is already condensed to roughly 2 hours and it is very noticeable. It feels as if the "filler" scenes have been cut out in order to create 1 movie instead of splitting it into 2 movies. Unless you are a long-time World of Warcraft player you will be lost into where the story is taking place as it jumps from one place and extremity to another with no buildup or any sense of direction. You're given names of places part-way through but you'll still end up pretty lost wondering where the heck things are currently taking place. You end up discovering things as they are in full immersion and asking yourself many times "hey did I miss something, when did that suddenly come into play?"
Despite that the movie has many holes in the storyline that if you blink you feel you might've missed what feels like 15 mins of plot buildup, the biggest fear of all I had was the use of CGI and the announcement that the graphics were going to look slightly cartoony in order to fit in with the game. Thankfully the orcs don't look like badly rendered Hulks (except for baby Thrall who looks like mini Shrek), but the dwarf race looks like they were plucked from Disney Pixar's Brave.
There's no introduction to the other races and they don't have much to do in the story as it's virtually based on humans vs orcs. The introduction to the movie only tells you that there is a war between orcs and humans and that the orc world was destroyed, but it doesn't tell you why their world was destroyed other than that the Fel had something to do with it. There's no explanation of who Gul'dan is and why he influences the orcs so much when they already have a warchief, and who the blue race at the start of the movie is and why the orcs have them in cages. Back in Stormwind during a heated discussion at the round table we see what I assume are 3 high elfs of the Kirin Tor who had only 7 words in the entirety of the movie and then we never see them again, but for anyone else who's never played World of Warcraft nobody would know who they were or why they were even in the movie. Even I don't know why they are there as they contribute nothing to the movie.
Graphics wise the movie is beautiful and full of tremendous detail on the cities and orc outposts, except perhaps the street view of the city exit to Stormwind being once again something plucked out from Shrek the movie. The music is also good and has you in places thinking you're watching the game until you realize the graphics are a bit too good for the game.
The acting is pretty good, but with holes throughout the story it makes it look bad in places.
Overall not a bad attempt, if there's a director's cut to be released then it must be enough film to double the length of the movie and make sense of why events took place instead of pasting all the action scenes next to each other and calling it a movie and would've appealed to not only the existing World of Warcraft players but to all viewers.