Warcraft: The Beginning (2016)

As an Orc horde invades the planet Azeroth using a magic portal, a few human heroes and dissenting Orcs must attempt to stop the true evil behind this war. 

With films like this, I'd rather leave my review a while after release, purely to avoid the hype – good and bad. While I never stepped into the black hole that is World of Warcraft, loads of my friends did, and I listened to their tales of derring-do with a fair amount of envy. My own experiences with the game franchise began and ended with Warcraft 3.

So when they announced a film for the game, I was interested, especially considering the cast (um, hello Travis Fimmel, Clancy Brown). Not only that, but this was the first of Duncan Jones's films that I've seen, so I was quite inclined to give the entire production the benefit of the doubt.

It seems in the media that it's become incredibly fashionable to totally bash films like this the moment they come out – the reviewer gleefully tearing the work a proverbial new one mere hours after its release. And oh my dog, if you're looking for issues, you're going to find them with *everything*.

I will say straight up that I enjoyed this film – and I am the target audience (gaming, SFF fan). I was entertained, and in that sense, the film did its job. The graphics were... Well, I grew up during the 1980s with all the blue-screen and stop-motion action. This was a visual feast that hit all the right buttons for me.

I've heard a lot of people bash the story as being weak, and I'm going to disagree. Yes, it was a simplified story considering the large cast of characters and how much is going on with the lore – so to a degree the writers had to paint in broader strokes. This is a movie, after all, not a TV series. But to me the plot was internally consistent. There were some lovely reversals and betrayals – not completely unexpected, but FFS, this was fun. I *enjoyed* myself. That was the point. Games generally are quite pulpy, and watching Warcraft felt like being immersed in one long cut scene. I admit I'm patchy on lore so *a lot* of what happened most likely went way over my head, but I went along with it. Friends of mine who've played WoW were transported saying that the world building was spot on, so that pleases me.

In case you're wondering why the OST is so epic – the composer is none other than Ramin Djawadi of Game of Thrones fame, which only made my experience at the local IMAX all the more awesome.

This is not a deep film by any stretch of the imagination. Stock standard themes abound – of how power corrupts and how we all win when we are able to take a moderate stance (a weeeeedle bit on the propaganda side there, if you ask me). But this one's a keeper, and I'll most certainly watch it again some time in the future. At any rate, there's no stretched-out landscape porn a la The Hobbit and the pacing will keep viewers on the edge of the seat.

Also, griffins. I'm a sucker for griffins. There. I said it.