UK Edition
Review
The Warcraft movie is naff fantasy in shiny, technicolour armour - review
Director: Duncan Jones. Starring: Travis Fimmel, Toby Kebbell, Paula Patton, Dominic Cooper, Ruth Negga, Daniel Wu, Ben Foster, Ben Schnetzer, Robert Kazinsky. Cert 12A, 123 mins
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.
Our setting is in the world of high fantasy, a genre based on Tolkien but largely stripped of his poetry and mythological depth. It’s marked generally by elves, cod-medieval societies and more magic than Gandalf ever employed. Terrys Goodkind and Brooks, Dungeons & Dragons and Robert Jordan are its mainstays; George RR Martin’s Song Of Ice & Fire is a nastier offshoot. But for World Of Warcraft, it is the background where millions of gamers save the world every month.
The theme is lebensraum. The hulking orc inhabitants of a dying world are led by Dominic Wu's sinister sorcerer Gul’dan - there’s that apostrophe – to the world of Azeroth, arriving in a remote corner of the kingdom of Stormwind. Among the performance-captured Horde is Durotan (Toby Kebbell), an honourable brawler and family orc who comes to doubt Gul’dan’s motives.
Meanwhile on the human side, Stormwind’s King Llane (Dominic Cooper) and his right-hand man Sir Anduin Lothar (Vikings’ Travis Fimmel) must find a way to stop this incursion, enlisting their old friend, the magician ‘guardian’ Medivh (Ben Foster). The half-orc Garona (Paula Patton) provides vital translation services between the two sides, while beings of goodwill struggle to find common ground and others plot betrayal.
This is all ancient history in the game, brought to life almost too vividly. If The Lord Of The Rings aesthetic was a restrained, almost elegiac depiction of a decaying world, this is a civilisation in full flower, bathed in sunshine broken only by the shadow of the odd passing griffin.
Our human heroes wear wildly impractical plate armour and Technicolor tunics straight out of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, while the orcs are overly familiar tusked apes, though at least given impressive weight and bulk by the effects experts at Industrial Light and Magic.
But the pristine setting never meshes with Jones’s efforts to give emotional reality to his army of characters, who cannot escape their tropes: leader, hero, warrior woman, mystic.
Durotan and the orcs of the Horde fare best, because little exposition is needed to establish their primitive society. But the human characters keep solemnly alluding to (presumably) game business far outside the scope of this film.
Fimmel’s barefoot knight, who displays hints of impish charisma and an uncanny talent for almost crying, and Patton’s conflicted Garona manage to carve a little space temporarily, but they too are derailed by endless scenes of magic being waved about.
Where Jones deserves most credit is in daring to kill named characters in a summer blockbuster. Admittedly, two of those might as well have "Dead Meat" tattooed on their foreheads, but most come as a surprise (at least to those of us unfamiliar with the history of Azeroth) and some are genuinely upsetting.
Still, it’s a far cry from Jones’s elegant debut Moon or the time-travel cleverness of Source Code. While there are pleasures here for fantasy fans and game players, for everyone else this fantasy is likely to prove so high it’s dizzying.
Warcraft is released on Monday May 30