So I went and saw Warcraft a couple of days ago. Got really drunk afterwards and had a particularly nasty hangover the next day. Don’t normally get headaches like that. This has nothing to do with the film, of course. I just felt like sharing.

Anyway, I got a pair of mates together and went and saw Warcraft. Both of them had played a fair bit of the games and had a firm grasp of the lore. Me? Never played a Warcraft game in my life. No, wait, I think I tried to play a bit of one campaign mission of Warcraft II or III back in highschool, but didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on so jumped out pretty quick. Soaked in a bit of lore from spending so much time immersed in nerd culture, but it doesn’t really go beyond: Alliance equals humans and dwarves and shit, generally the good guys; and Horde equals orcs and wolves and shit, generally the bad guys. So I went in relatively clean. They went in dirty. What did I think?

Honestly, it was a bit shit.

I mean, not especially shit. Not terrible. But a bit shit. Unimpressive. Not particularly good. And that’s a bit of a shame. Everytime we get a film adaptation of a video game franchise (and they’re always franchises) there’s a bit of hope around. I’m not entirely sure what we’re hoping for anymore. We’ve got mainstream acceptance (every man and his grandmum are playing some video game or another) and we’ve pretty well established that games are an artistic medium (or at least the people that fought against this are either dead or proven to not have a clue what they’re talking about). Maybe it’s because a film adaptation has always been the benchmark of success for an intellectual property, vindication for fans of the book or comic or cartoon or boardgame. A statement that, yes, this thing you love is worth spending two hundred million dollars on and a theatrical release. Maybe we just hope that this movie about something we love won’t be shit.

Maybe that was why I didn’t love this film. I’m not a fan of the Warcraft games. The two blokes I went with, they’re fans of the Warcraft games. They enjoyed it more than me. My mate Jordan (one of the gismos over at Evade Gismo) absolutely loved it, to his great surprise. He did not want to see it ’til I told him I convinced him, told him that if it succeeded I wanted to see it work and if it failed I wanted to see the trainwreck. I was curious, I think he was concerned about them butchering the source material. He thought it was excellent. Loved it. I thought it was a bit shit.

It wasn’t trainwreck bad, and I could see why my mates really enjoyed it. There’s the bones of a pretty awesome, epic film experience. And the orcs look fuckin’ amazing. Really great. Like, I was expecting some proper uncanny valley shit but these guys and girls fit into the world so well and so easily. But the movie still fails to deliver, for big and small reasons.

Too many characters with too many names that are bloody hard to keep track of with pretty bloody atrocious characterisation. I mean, yeah, Duracell the orc is noble and all that. I couldn’t remember his name by the end of it, and his scenes are full of grand sacrifice for no discernable cause or consequence. Seriously the guy goes and {probably a massive spoiler} and nothing changes. Not a fucking thing. Orc Gamora makes no fucking sense. She’s loyal to the orcs. No, she’s loyal to the humans. No she’s loyal to both. But she’s killing orcs right now. But she’ll kill humans later. But she’ll be sad about it. Why the fuck is she hell was she loyal to the orcs at all though? They were the ones who chained her up and have been treating her like shit her whole life ’cause she’s got smaller teeth or something. I think they’re trying to push the whole this is just orc culture and society and what she’s used to, but she sure is happy to push all of that aside as soon as Queen Only-Other-Lady-With-A-Speaking-Role gives her a blanket. Then there’s that Aussie actor who plays Ragnar Lothbrok in Vikings playing Ragnar Lothbrok right down to the way he stands. I wonder it it’s because there was so little characterisation in the script and directions that he had no choice but to pull out a bit of Ragnar, because the director is a big Ragnar fan so put that characterisation into the script and directions or because he just really likes playing Ragnar so is bringing it to his other roles. Probably a mixture of the three.

You’ll notice at this point I’m not using the actual character names. That is because I’m struggling to remember most of them and I cannot be arsed to look them up.

I’m not even sure if the king of the humans gets a name. He just seems to be called “the king,” or the more familial “our king.” Awful hair though. Seriously, he’s got the kind of stupid fucking hair you’d see in period pieces or medieval fantasy around the seventies and eighties, along with electro-synth soundtracks. Because kids love electro-synth. The orc leader Goldan (I think that might actually be his real name) is pretty cool. Spends the film all hunched and menacing and evil wizardy until near the end when he goes all King Bumi on us. Cauldron the mage get’s some of the worst lines in the film and he hams them up pretty bad. Medieve doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, especially given how bloody obvious it is that he’s {probably another spoiler}.

And those are just my issues with the characters. I mean, there’s nothing really terrible about them. I don’t hate anyone. But, they’re just a bit shit. And so you just don’t care about any of their noble sacrifices and meaningless deaths. ‘Cause yeah, some of them die.

The story suffers because it tries to take too much from the video games. Or is too much like a video game. Or takes the wrong things from video games. Like, there’s this opening scene where a dwarf gives Ragnar a flintlock pistol. Ragnar’s all “WTF’s this?” and the dwarf is like “This is the tits. We call it boom stick (title’s a work in progress)” and then a messenger arrives to tell Ragnar to get back to Stormwind. This is all to set up a fucking joke, where Ragnar shoots an orc and is surprised by how powerful his new toy is. That’s fucking all. The same effect could have been achieved by showing Ragnar tucking a musket into his belt before going to kill some orcs. Bam. Done. I just made a two hour goddamn movie a few precious minutes shorter. Because here’s the thing, shit like that is necessary in video games. It’s a tutorial level. Here’s your new weapon, here’s how it works, here’s a training level where you can try it out. But this does not translate well to film. It’s unnecessary and it breaks the flow of the film. Some shit needs to be explained. “Soldier knows how to use a boomstick” does not.

Fuck, I can go on and on. How do I explain this a little more simply?

Alright, you know how I said the orcs look amazing? All the CGI does. Real spectacular, lots of detail, the horde looks like it’s made up of individuals and the magic looks great. Real awesome job Visual FX guys and gals. But the practical effects? The practical effects look like shit. Stone walls look like painted wood and I’ve seen swords and armour homemade by cosplayers that looked better than half the costumes and props being used. Apparently the whole budget went into the computer animation, while the practical designers were given twenty bucks and told to make do.

What this film does right, it does really well. Like the orcs. But what it does wrong? I can spend a long time going through all it does wrong. Too long. Ask me later if you really want me to through all of it.

Couple of suggestions though for if you’re planning on making your own epic fantasy story (based on a video game or otherwise).

First, diversity matters. If there’s no reason for a character to not be a female, there’s no reason for a character to not be female. Now, I’m not talking about turning Ragnar or Cauldron into a lady. Nobody needs the hate mail that’d come from that. But there’s these two other Stormwind commanders, black clean-shaven guy and white bearded guy, who get basically no lines and are just there because even Ragnar can’t kill the entire hoard himself. There’s no reason why these both need to be dudes. One of them could very easily have been a lady. It doesn’t affect the story at all, and earns you a tonne of goodwill. Fuck, it might earn you a lot more money and positive social media attention as well. There’s little that Tumblr loves more than supporting female characters, and suddenly this random background lady becomes the star of a thousand AUs, theories and in depth character discussions.

Second, maybe think about where you start your story. Maybe start with something more personal rather than epic. I mean, yeah, epic is great and all, but Lord of the Rings waited until midway through the second film before expanding the scope from “these nine guys against fifty” to “a few thousand versus a lot more thousand.” Establish your world, establish your characters, tell a more personal story. Then threaten the end of the world.

I didn’t hate this film. It’s not terrible. It’s just a bit shit.

And I’m just throwing it out there: Ragnar is the brother of the Queen. A white guy with a Northern European accent is the brother of black woman who speaks the Queen’s English. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this, I am saying the exact opposite in fact. They obviously had an interesting (possibly heartbreaking) family life, and went from a small village on the borders of the kingdom (if I recall the film correctly, which I’ve already acknowledged I probably don’t) to become the commander of the King’s armies and the mother of his children respectively. That sounds like some Game of Thrones level shit right there. I would watch that. I would watch the hell out of that.