Unimpressed

Rating: 4/10 (30 September 2016)

What's there to say? I was relatively excited for this movie, it's Warcraft man, the books are already written like they're just ready to be compressed into a script. What we instead got was cuts to important parts of the story, characters and their relationships being changed, changing the impact of events and actions, and finally, misleading the audience as to what is really going on. Mind you, I may have some issues with how characters are represented, but it happens, it's impossible to expect Khadgar, a lanky ginger, to be 100% represented as such. I didn't want Khadgar to be played by someone like Rupert Grint. That said: I hate this movie. Genuinely hate, because I know what it's doing and I hate what that represents. It's like gentrification if gentrification were a thing in movies. It's playing to the lowest common denominator, and it sickens me. There are several reasons as to why I hate this movie and I will now proceed to list them out.
1. The Characters, their relationships, and actions are changed: Durotan is the leader of the Frost-Wolf clan, Doomhammer was the leader of the Doomhammer clan (in the books) this was a friendship built on the fact that they did an unorthodox thing in their youth that would later make them great friends and showcase their more unorthodox mannerisms of thinking. Here's the problem; they made Doomhammer a basic peon whom becomes the right-hand man of Durotan instead of a friendship built out of mutual respect through both having the same destiny. The same goes with Garona; the half-draenei/half-orc girl who was basically a greenpainted woman. In the book Medivh curses her to be forced into killing everyone she will ever care for. Not some half-assed "she will be accepted into the clan" nonsense, it changes the character and their motivations completely in this way.
2. The events are not layered in a way that makes sense: No one really understands what Fel magic is or where it came from or how Gul'Dan (a character that was supposed to be weak and meager, not Adonis in the flesh) seized power, or who the hell Ner'Zhul or Sargeras is. You don't see what the greatest sin of the Orcs is; or how they caused their planet to succumb to utter destruction. You just know they're bad cause they kill some humans, and that's bad I guess, I'm not really sure; cause I'm just told these things.
3. I'm not really being shown, more so told, or given context to immediate actions: This to me is the greatest sin: story-telling is much more than just words, especially in movies, not one thing is really shown without it either being given immediate context before or just after it occurs. This makes every action; no matter how much I question it, boring, there's no sense of wonder to any of it, as I know as an audience member that right-away it would be explained to me, oh, our protagonists son is killed? Have him sit on a bar table drinking a jug of alcohol in the next scene, what's this? Medivh's eyes went evil looking? Better have Khadgar look into it next scene and explain it to our protagonist. It's lazy script writing and it's annoying.
4. Am I being misled? This ain't cool man: The worst part is definitely the fact that Medivh's corruption is explained as "Oh some demon took him over" without mentioning the fact that it's Sargeras. The big alpha dog. That's like having Satan take over the body in The Exorcist and saying "Oh yeah, this is just some little imp in her throat" it's silly, if Khadgar could go so far as to figure out Medivh's corruption; he'd obviously look into what a demon or fel magic is right? It doesn't add up how all these smart characters are acting so absolutely stupid.
In short; if you're a small-time World of Warcraft/Warcraft fan, or you like it when a rich-story is diluted into over-linear hallway stories, you'll probably love this movie. If you grew up on Warcraft, Warcraft 2, 3, Frozen Throne, and World of, then you'll see the sham of a movie that this is, and call it out like I did here.