Critics, What Were You Expecting From A Warcraft Movie?

2016 was supposed to be the year for movies based on video games. Early signs were promising: Ratchet and Clank seemed like it could be the first truly decent adaptation judging by its trailers, but a negative critical reception contributed towards it instead becoming a bomb.

The other big video game movie of the year, Warcraft: The Beginning, based on the once gargantuan MMORPG, was recently released to press and, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, received a critical drubbing, leaving it sitting on a 29% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is as antiquated and inaccurate a system to judge the quality of a movie as you’re ever likely to see.

“It’s easy to predict whether Duncan Jones’s take on the world-conquering online role-playing game World Of Warcraft is for you. If you take delight in names like “Orgrim Doomhammer” and have a high tolerance for randomly scattered apostrophes and superfluous “h”’s, it could be your film of the summer. If not, you should avoid it at all costs. While there’s something admirable in Jones’s steadfast adherence to naff fantasy tropes, it makes no concession to fans of realism.” – The Telegraph, 2/5

“Imagine “Battlefield Earth” without the verve and you get this sludgy, tedious fantasy adventure, a fun-starved dud that’s not even unintentionally hilarious” – The Wrap

“There’s a lot going on and yet we’re never quite engaged with it. In The Lord of the Rings, we had the Shire, the Hobbits’ idyllic pastoral realm, as an image of what everyone was fighting for. Here, we barely see Azeroth outside the royal castles and wizards’ towers and epic battlegrounds. The heavy use of CGI, and its occasionally awkward interactions with the live-action elements, only serves to distance us even more. Much processing power has been put in the service of spectacular, bludgeoning combat, but the images are somehow insubstantial, and we rarely feel the heat of the battle.” – The Guardian, 2/5

That same review from The Guardian also went on to lament the supposedly racist undertones of the film. The reviewer, Steve Rose, colours it as if its creators had purposely intended for the darker-skinned orcs to be the villains because, apparently, we can’t live a second in this world without something being surreptitiously offensive.

To the critics panning Warcraft: The Beginning, I have to ask this: what were you honestly expecting?

Some of the most common complaints hurled at the film are that it’s hollow, overbearing with its CGI, and hard to approach if you’re a neutral. Duncan Jones, director of Moon and Source Code, has crafted a love letter to the lore of the series while also trying to appeal to the mainstream. How do you capture a big audience? Appeal to them. And what do people want to see? Judging by box office returns, they want loud noises and a departure from reality.

Despite what some might think, for every Tree of Life, we need a Warcraft or a Transformers. Life is hard: your boss might be a bastard; the bills might be piling up and perhaps your cat is secretly plotting to suffocate you. Movies like Warcraft help up us to put our brains on our ice, to stop the worries of our regular lives dominating our thoughts for two hours. Any critic going into Warcraft expecting to see a revolution in filmmaking is deluded.

To suggest that the majority of critics were antipathetic towards the movie purely based on its license wouldn’t be too outlandish. It would be even less outlandish to suggest that their minds were already made up long before they took to their seats at screenings. It’s no accident that whenever a critic covers an adaptation like this, they explicitly make reference to it being based on a video game as if it was derogatory. Expect to read a lot of complaints about a video game movie being “just as loud and obnoxious” as the IP it originated from before you even read the review.

I am no fan of the World of Warcraft series and never have been – I think I would rather do anything over than participate in a raid and be told to “fuck the fuck off” because I messed up. However, I can see that a Warcraft movie actually coming to fruition is nothing but a good thing. Barriers are constantly being broken down when it comes to the perception of gamers by the general public, but there are still those that see the culture as something to be looked down upon, the awkward teenager in the corner. The more movies that are made like Warcraft, the more social acceptance we will see.

Until the day comes when a video game movie pleases both critics and fans, which will probably be the much-vaunted The Last of Us adaptation, take everything these reviews say with a pinch of salt. Warcraft: The Beginning is currently sitting on an 8.1 on IMDb before wide release. Don’t be surprised to see that drop less than two points after the film is out and the public have had their say.