I have heard about the news that the Hollywood wanted to make the movie adapted from 1 of the great games in PC from few years ago, i.e. Warcraft. As I have previously mentioned, I was a bit skeptical when it comes to movies adapted from video games. However, when I saw Angry Bird movie (which I have reviewed before), I changed my mind a bit and wanted to give this one a try.
Unfortunately, when I saw the trailer to this movie, I became less excited since the movie's CGI seemed too obvious for my taste. I felt that I could be watching the cinematic scene from the game itself which I think should not be the case for a US$ 160 million budget movie. Nevertheless, I still want to give it a chance. So when I have the earliest opportunity to watch it, I went to the theater and see it.
Brief Story Line (warning possible spoiler)
Movie started with the scene of Durotan (played by Toby Kebbel - Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) an Orc chief of the clan Frostwolf having a chat with his wife Draka (played by Anna Galvin) who was pregnant with their child. They were worried about their child's welfare since their world were almost destroyed. The warlock chief Gul'dan (played by Daniel Wu - Hong Kong actor in New Police Story, Shinjuku Incident etc) wanted to bring the horde (the Orcs people) to a new world, through the portal that he would create. That new world happened to be the seven kingdoms of humans. Gul'dan always used fel (a magic that can bring extra power to the orcs and even bring the dead to live) to increase his power over the orcs.
When the portal was opened, the majority of the Horde led by Gul'dan and their warchief Blackhand (played by Clancy Brown) and his right hand man Doomhammer (played by Robert Kazinsky) together with Durotan, Draka and a half Orc-half human prisoner named Garona (played by Paula Patton - 2 Guns, MI:Ghost Protocol etc) came to the humans' world. Draka delivered her baby during the process. Once they came to this world, the Orcs started to invade the villages and take humans as prisoners. These humans would serve as the source of fel magic for Gul'dan.
Meanwhile in the humans world, Anduin Lothar (played by Travis Fimmel - Vikings tv series) who was a famous knight and the brother in law of the king Llane (played by Dominic Cooper - Howard Stark of Marvel's comic book movies & TV series) got the news of these attacks by giant creatures riding on big wolves. When he returned to the palace, he was informed of a mage named Khadgar (played by Ben Schnetzer who looks so much alike 1 of my colleague at the office. LOL) going through the corpses of the orcs attack. He informed that the fel magic was used in this attack and informed the Guardian must be summoned.
Due to the critical matter, Khadgar and Lothar went to the place where the Guardian, Medhiv (played by Ben Foster - Contraband, The Finest Hours) had been staying for a while. Medhiv was a very powerful warlock and when he was informed about fel magic, he immediately agreed to look into these attacks. Khadgar was very amazed with the huge collections of magic books in Medhiv's place and located a book that could give him a lot of information later.
Medhiv, Khadgar and Lothar met with the group of orcs who wanted to attack the village. They had a major fight where with the help from Medhiv, all the orcs who have been fed with fel magic could not survive and only few were able to escape including Durotan. He later released Garona from the chain and head back to orcs' base. The humans were able to capture 1 of the orc and Garona and return to the palace.
Finally the humans were able to understand the purpose of orcs invasion to their world. Few of the humans army led by Lothar, accompanied by Khadgar and also Garona went to investigate the portal and to find the way to fend off this invasion. Durotan who felt that Gul'dan was not the right leader to give orcs a new place to stay and bring peace, wanted to bring down Gul'dan. However, since Gul'dan was too powerful, he wanted to seek the help from the humans and asked Garona to mitigate this "peaceful" cooperation.
So can this cooperation be successful and bring down Gul'dan? Or will it go wrong and make the hostility be even worse? Will Garona be helping the humans due to her feeling towards Lothar, or would she choose to fight for orcs whom she had been living with all her life as prisoner? Find them all in this 2 hours movie.
End of Brief Story Line
Well after watching it till finished, I cannot help but feeling the movie was good, but not that great. To my surprise, when I finally watched the full movie, the CGI did not seem so obvious like in the trailer. It was a little bit better. But it might be because I saw it in a large theater. Not so sure if I saw it in the usual smaller theater.
Anyway, I enjoyed this movie but not as greatly as I would hope for. However, it was not that bad either. There were few fighting scenes (not brutal ones), some good special effects on the magic of Medhiv and Gul'Dar, plus some better fights usually involving Lothar (which made me tempted to watch the Vikings TV series where he was the main character). There were also few brief touching moments but not the tearful ones.
There was also 1 scene that I felt like a story of Moses from the bible when Durotan's child was put in a basket and put into the river, and funny enough the person next to me said the same thing to her company about similar Moses scene.
For a video game adapted film, this one was only a so so movie. I was truly hoping the fighting scenes would be a spectacular one, but somehow it lacked that touch. Again it might be due to the special effects of the orcs that were not so satisfying to me.
Btw, I believe the title had the word "Beginning" since they wanted to do a trilogy of this one.
If you want to enjoy the special effects of great fighting scenes between humans and orcs, I strongly suggest Lord of the Rings trilogy or The Hobbits trilogy to be your better choice. However, if you want to enjoy the nostalgic feeling when you play this famous video games created by BLIZZARD, where you can choose to fight as humans or as orcs, then this movie could satisfy you.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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