Monday Movie Mania - Warcraft

Once again, we used an HBO free weekend to catch up on movies we missed in the theaters last year. Warcraft is one of those movies that had a lot of potential, and...

OMG! It sucked so bad!

This one of those cases when the best cast in the world making a movie based on the most popular MMORPG ever can't save a turgid turd of a script.

Warcraft wants to be Lord of the Rings for a new generation. Except Tolkien wasn't trying to recoup millions of dollars of investment when he wrote his saga. Warcraft is trying to be too much to be everything to everyone and succeeds at nothing.

1) I don't have a problem with viewpoints from multiple characters in a story. However, in most good stories the POV characters start out together with a unifying purpose. The Starks and their duty in Game of Thrones. The gathering of the Fellowship to destroy the One Ring in LotR.

Here the POVs are convoluted. Are we supposed to care about Durotan and his dying world? Lothar, whose home is being invaded by the desperate orcs? Khadgar, who starts as a total chickshit wizard before taking over as Guardian of Azeroth? Who exactly am I supposed to be identifying with and rooting for here?

Unfortunately, the story doesn't carry the soapish fascination that Game of Thrones has where there are characters you love to hate. Which bring me to...

2) The character development is rather lazy and half-assed. All the characters are reactive, rather than proactive. If we are given a reason for a certain action, it is never really fleshed out. We don't know why Gul'dan or Medivh succumbed to the Dark Side of the Force fel, and the sad part is you don't really care either.

3) I have nothing against CGI, but you can't use it sell your movie without a fucking story behind it. This isn't a story. It's a part of a story.  It ends near the beginning of the middle, so you're left with a feeling of incompleteness. And going back to the other two points, you're not given to a reason to want to find out what happens next.

4) I wanted Dominick Cooper to shut up so fucking bad because whatever the hell accent he was using sounded awful!

I'm so fucking glad I didn't spend my valuable popcorn money on this piece of crap. In a very rare case, because I can usually find something redeeming in a movie, I give Warcraft 0 out of 10 stars.

Yeah, it WAS that bad.