The ideas behind Warcraft are so great, and the people behind the project are so talented that the fact that it’s not a good movie is enough to tire one of the entire prospect of a blockbuster. It’s the type of film that displays the ever slightest bit of promise, and then without mercy slowly allows all of it to drip away allowing the audience to slowly grow with dread. Warcraft is a truly incredible torture display. In its beginning moments, Warcraft is fascinating. The darker, more creepy tone that is displayed is classic dark fantasy and seems a perfect fit for Duncan Jones. This is almost a delicious tone. The fact that the images on the screen are both inspired and interesting makes this glimmer even more promising. Durotan (Toby Kebbell) and his fellow orcs are marvelous creatures of motion capture wizardry. It’s not as good as the work in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, but they’re so wonderfully expressive that the film draws you in. For the record for as bad as the review is about to get from here the direction of Duncan Jones, while being horribly misguided, never drops into the realm of bad. His action especially is startlingly hard hitting for PG-13 films, at the least in smaller scale intimate moments. The following sections of Warcraft feel like it’s excruciatingly bleeding out all the promise that it originally held. The moment when it starts is almost subtle, almost to the point that you miss it. As you move into the ending of the first act the dialogue doesn’t change from setup and continues that way forever. Characters aren’t characters, and the inert nature of this grinds the fantasy adventure to such a halt for so long that by the ending you’ll be begging for the final act to be just skipped. The story is the next similarity to the aforementioned Apes movie in that Warcraft steals the powerful, “You May Be the Leader, but Your Followers Want to Fight Turning this Into an Unstoppable Tragedy,” conceit of that entire movie. It can’t even orchestrate it correctly, though. By the end of the film instead of being saddened by the emotional bonds that the characters shared being ripped apart for unstoppable, but trivial reasons, I was saddened by the draining of anything that could have made Warcraft meaningful and bearable. The dark tone had soured, and soon after realizing that it had nothing else to offer the film started to rely on extremely unsubtle pop iconography that overshadows the power that scenes may have held. The hate that has descended on the actors is deserved, but these are incredible actors given material that does not suit them so I will not break them down too much. Their engagement level is different across the board with some like Travis Fimmel doing his best, and others like Paula Patton not trying to do anything special. Fimmel is a great actor (in fact I saw him in a very nuanced performance this same weekend) but even the best of performance drowns in this film. Warcraft is the type of film that takes everything out of the person watching it. At almost every turn it’s excruciating in a dangerous way. So inept that I thought two characters were hooking up only to be reminded soon after the film that they were brother and sister by another viewer. To explain such a thing proves only scattershot, and dumbfounded. I implore you to go see something else. The Lobster is weird and cruel, but it’s awesome, and Maggie’s Plan is really funny. Don’t see this. Warcraft gets a 2 out of 10 .
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |