I just might buy this one

Rating: 6/10 (11 June 2016)

I knew of this movie, that it is coming out but it did not interested me that much. I never played the game and the trailers didn't do a thing for me. Than the movie opened in the states and critics wrote it off right away as a failure.
Today I wanted to see a movie, and this was the only one on play that I have not seen yet but was willing to pay for. Given that my only expectation was to be entertained, I must say that this movie was a very pleasant surprise. It is not a great movie, not by a long shot, but it does the job it was set out to do rather well. And that job was: set up a franchise.
The good: The basic plot of the movie is quite good and there were some twists and turns that really payed off. The ending especially was very satisfying to me. The orcs look freakin great and basically all the scenery look beautiful. The genre of the movie is fantasy and it shows. another thing that I really liked is that the wast majority of the actors who were not doing motion capture are best know for their TV work, so this movie could be a career launching pad for many talented people.
The not so good: The movie is based on a computer game and has to set up the franchise, meaning that it has to show locations and factions and stuff that are not relevant to this movie. Now, this movie already has a build in audience of millions of gamers to whom all this exposition is useless because they already know the mythology of the world our story is set, but as for the casual movie goer, that only knows that warcraft is a popular game, at best. So half of the first act is basically a huge information dump that is incomplete, unnecessary (for the current story) and overall unusable. But it will make sense 2 years from now in the sequel. My second problem with the movie is that its too short. There must be a good 20-30 minutes of story that were cut out because of length. Because of this some things are not set up as well as they should be. Like, the motivation of the main villain is not explained. There is a hint towards the "why" but thats about it. Also, some lines of dialog were rather flat, like if they were taken right out of the game, so yeah, some better dialog is badly needed. And as a personal taste, some of the costume design of the humans were rather tacky. It just goes to show that some elements needs to be adapted for the big screen as they do not work as well as they did in the game.
Overall, this is a decent movie, and if they will nail the sequel, which will come, we will have the first good fantasy franchise since the lord of the rings.