Needs more substance

Rating: 5/10 (1 December 2018)

WARCRAFT is yet another movie adaptation of a popular video game. I used to play the original WARCRAFT back in the late 1990s when it was much different and more straightforward when compared to the sprawling WORLD OF WARCRAFT MMORPG available today. Sadly, the film turns out to be merely lukewarm, a rehash of fantasy tropes and cliches that inevitably harks back to LORD OF THE RINGS as well as AVATAR and about a dozen other influences. I'm no fan of the motion capture technology used in cinema today and it's rather ineffective here; the orcs themselves look like nothing more than slightly awkward CGI creations and a ton of possibly decent performances from the likes of Daniel Wu et al are wasted within them. The human plot is simplistic in the extreme and although the likes of Travis Fimmel and Ben Foster do their best, they can in actuality do very little with the cliches they're given. On the plus side, some of the sprawling action scenes are visually impressive, particularly at the climax, and the non-orc CGI effects are frankly great; I just wish we had more substance to go with the style.