Chaotic

Rating: 3/10 (20 November 2016)

When their world is destroyed, a group of orcs plot to invade the planet Azeroth by using a magic portal. The Orcs have used human prisoners to assist with the creation of this portal. When they become aware of the Orcs plans, a group of human heroes band together to stop the Orcs from taking over their planet. However, some of the Orcs are unhappy with their leader Gul'dan's regime and plans for the humans and band together with the humans to try to overthrow both him and his loyal followers.
It's hard to really know where to begin writing a review about Warcraft: The Beginning as, for me, it was a film that was flawed across a wide range of areas...
For starters, the story is muddled and not particularly well-explained - I haven't played the video game so I knew next to nothing about this film before I started watching it. The picture has very little depth and at no point does it really give us much insight into both the humans world and the Orcs world. It also doesn't really help that the characters are not really developed and had there been some kind of camaraderie between the characters then this may have made the film just about 'watchable'. But herein lies the problem, both the characters and the story are painfully dull, the dialogue is fairly weak and I actually found myself bored at several points during the film. If the villains, heroes and story are not given any kind of focus or development why should I care about anything that happens?
As I mentioned above, what 'story' there is here seems to have been thrown together with very little thought or care. The film shunts backwards and forwards, the film moves from one action scene to another and one character to another but it doesn't do any of this in a way that feels logical. The action scenes are quite good and do give the film bursts of energy from time to time, but the editing and the way that the whole film has been put together takes away more than it adds and it just started giving me a headache towards the end.
The only minor saving grace with this film lies with the acting and the likes of Travis Fimmel and Ben Foster were both excellent. As I've mentioned some of the battles give the film a much needed boost of energy, but the whole thing is so sloppily structured that it ultimately feels like a lot of hard work has gone to waste.
The truly sad thing is that I can actually see a decent story in amongst this mess of a film, but Jones never allows it to truly develop and he also gives many of the characters nothing to do and their lack of camaraderie really hurts the film. It's a bit of a shambles and really does waste nearly all of its potential.