You'll like it if you're already familiar with the Lore

Rating: 7/10 (17 June 2016)

Movies based on video games tend to not be so good, Warcraft might be an exception. Nevertheless it seems to have gotten a lot of bad press. I noticed that most of the critics who gave the film negative reviews were people who have never played, or were were not familiar with the games.
I've been a long-time fan of the Warcraft series since the second game came out in 1996. Since then I've played through all of the Warcraft RTS games, and was a World of Warcraft subscriber for several years. I was one of the few WoW players to earn the achievement "lore master" for completing all of the quests in the primary zones vanilla WoW (and the first few expansions). So I'm pretty well versed on the story.
I did get kind of burned out on World of Warcraft after Wrath of the Lich King. I canceled my subscription soon after reaching the level cap. I would resubscribe for brief periods here and there just to see what's going on, but for the most part I was done with WoW. Still, I'm a fan of the game and lore, so I guess I'm probably the target demographic for this film.
The film was pretty faithful to the lore of the games (and the lore of the games has, itself changed over time since the original warcraft ms-dos that came out in 1994). The film is basically about the first war from that first game Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, focusing on the characters from the first game: Garona, Lothar (probably the main characters), Medhiv, King Llane, and Blackhand. Now if they limited themselves to focusing on just these characters and limited themselves to sticking to just the story of the first game, the film, while being pretty simple, would have probably worked better for those new to the story of warcraft. There would have been fewer characters. Fewer simultaneous plots, and they would have been able to focus on developing the stories and characters and easing people into the fantasy via more relatable protagonists.
But there's one major problem with doing it this way. The story of the first game was very human-centric. The POV of the orcs was told entirely from the half-orc, Garona in the instruction booklet that came with the first game, and it didn't portray the orcs in a very good light at all. On the contrary, it portrayed the orcs as evil warlike savages with almost no redeeming qualities. You actually don't get a deeper understanding of the orcs until Warcraft 2 when we are introduced Gul'Dan, Ogrim Doomhammer and Kil'Jaeden. And it's not until Warcraft 3 that we actually start to view the orcs in a more sympathetic light with the introduction of the orcs Gromm Hellscream and, of course, the warchief Thrall, son of Durotan, a character who was not introduced until World of Warcraft (and plays a major role in the most recent expansion). In the film, Durotan is, in fact, one of the main protagonists.
So, to make a long story short, the problem with this film is exactly that, they're trying to make a long, complicated and lore rich story with a lot of characters, into a short two hour film. Perhaps if it was split into two films, one that told the story from the humans POV, and another that told the story from the Orcs POV it would have worked better, after all that's how the story was told in the original game. It split the story up into two separate narratives. And, in the end, isn't that always what war comes down to? Two opposing narratives competing for dominance. This movie tries to to be sympathetic to both sides of the conflict at the same time. And as result the audience can't get as invested in any of the characters or the conflicts they are engaged in. It loses the sense of urgency and drama. When you try to please everyone, you please no one.
Well ... that's not true. The film did please me. I enjoyed seeing the lore I've grown up with over the passed 20 years come to life on the screen. I did enjoy the spectacle and the special effects as well. It was a cool movie all things considered. But I understand why people who weren't familiar with the games walked away from this one disappointed.