My Client: Warcraft

I would like to start this off by saying that i have no major interest of the Warcraft universe or mythos, thus i have no personal stake in whether or not this film turned out good or bad. From the trailers i had no hope for this film, it looked very generic and small in scale. It turns out, i rather enjoyed it.

This film caught me off guard when i watched it, the first 10 minutes established the film had scale, and for a film of this caliber scale is needed. I believe that if a film has a big budget, especially a fantasy film, needs a sense of scale and this film did build a universe that felt believable. In building the universe however the my biggest criticism, from a storytelling aspect, would be be the characters, the fact i can't remember any of the names and even during the film it was towards the end that i started to learn the characters names. The characters were also rather bland, with the only believable characters being the main Orc and the King played by Dominic Cooper.

Special effects are a major problem with modern day blockbusters, but Warcraft is an exception. The motion capture for the orc is very impressive and actually took me by surprise, and the effects in general were very well blended with the live action parts, of course a few parts looked off but that is going to be an issue with a film that is lacking in practical effects. I do feel a film like this would have benefited with some old school practical effects and miniatures, especially for the backgrounds. Matte paintings would have been perfect for this movie and could have been less distracting than the green screen backdrops. Lighting is also a problem in this film, only in certain parts but it did become distracting and i have noticed it a lot with modern blockbusters that lighting is become more and more of an issue. With Warcraft it seems that a lot of effort and talent went into the orc sections, especially the camp scene at night where the lighting is perfect and there is a lot of attention to detail but contrasted with the scenes in Stormwind where the image felt flat and there was not much contrast to the image, but these are minor nitpicks.

The year of 2016 was disastrous for film, and this was a total surprise and it should be given a second chance by people and critics. Yes the film has problems, but so does Rogue One and yet everyone loves that purely based on the Star Wars name. I can imagine this being good for people who are into the Warcraft universe and would recommend it over other films such as Rogue One and Fantastic Beasts, it was the purest fantasy film of 2016 that i saw.

Overall a harshly criticized film that deserves another shot due to it not being plagued by the problems that most modern blockbusters suffer from.

7/10

Written By
Ashley Harvey