It's watchable best I can say about it.....

Played both Warcraft 1 and 2 which peeked my interest. Took one look at the trailers and thought, nah can't be bothered. It appears to be lacking any real substance. Something someone would watch then immediately forget about just by walking half way back to the lobby of the cinema if you know what I mean.

Played some Warcraft game few years before, but never got around to finish it. So, I ended up watching the movie just out of curiosity. Now that I want to remember something about the movie, nothing pops out. Unlike The Matrix 1, Terminator 2, LOTR 3(logy)...

Guess, it depends on what one expects from a movie. Also the thought affinities of that person and the mental state/mood at that point of time... 🤣. Personally speaking, in general, feeling pretty Content amidst the Chaos, by keeping the expectations way low...to the point of nothing 😉 .

It's like WoW, pretty and lots of action but pretty soulless. Works as well as any of the Marvel popcorn movies.

It depends if you are into the Warcraft universe. If you are, it does hold some value, although I agree it is a bit bland. However it is supposed to be a trilogy (or at least they are supposed to come up with more movies).

I for example eat and drink Warcraft lore. I spent much time playing 1, 2 and 3 (including lots and lots of Battle.net multiplayer games) and I am playing daily World of Warcraft (been playing daily since 2004). So for me personally the movie speaks more as I have some (in depth) knowledge of the lore and characters. However for someone who is not into Warcraft as much the movie might not have too much to offer.

Some trivia: the movie was a flop in nearly all the world except in China (and to a lesser exent in S.Korea) where it made more than 2/3 of its world income, so the (already planned and announced) sequel will be backed by chinese investors, filmed in China and aimed primarily at the chinese market.

What are you doing in my city, spell-chucker?

I played bits of 1 and 2, a lot of 3, and WoW up to WoD. The film feels like later WoW expansions, too much balancing this and that action or emotion or whatever, too many inconsistencies, and some actions characters take which don't seem authentic or simply don't make sense, overblown special effects. There were a few places I went apeshit I hated it so much. But there were some good bits, things that made me feel - yep, that's just like I imagined it, or what it was like to play WoW [that is probably more about scenery or action, not plot or characterisation].

I read a couple of the Warcraft novels around the same time I saw the film and though they provided some background to the games, they had a similar shallow but overblown feel to the film's character interplay and storyline.

My conclusion: warcraft and even WoW was once fun but has become massively over-worked. Suspect diablo went the same way with D3. But it's pretty much how all franchises seem to go - people like to maximise how much they can squeeze from punters, and there's a huge appetite out there [it seems] for background stories, tie-ins, the latest retcon, ridiculous and needless backstories eg about how the villains childhood influenced their outlook, romances that serve no purpose except to make the story even more mundane ... characters with ridiculous muscles ... great leaders who make obviously shit decisions or turn into a Jesus clone and give up [or both]... and of course let's add in something for everyone throughout history and across the world so that ultimately every franchise starts to act, sound and look like every other one... and hey, let's have a game where they can all take part together... etc. Much of which is possibly inevitable when you're driven by profit, and they are only games, but there was a time I took Blizzard stuff seriously, and it pissed me off when I realised they didn't. But then even Tolkien had inconsistencies apparently and changed his mind without getting round to make all his works consistent.

Not as good as Ultramarines: The Movie, which was awesome

ratfink wrote:

Much of which is possibly inevitable when you're driven by profit, and they are only games, but there was a time I took Blizzard stuff seriously, and it pissed me off when I realised they didn't.

Yes, I can totally relate to that.

I still believe that the best piece of Warcraft fiction outside the games themselves is the story as told in the manual of Orcs and Humans. IIRC Warcraft II generally did not deviate from that background although it introduced the whole "orcs doing the demons' bidding" plot which was elaborated upon in Warcraft III and beyond, but the first two games still felt like a continuation of a more or less consistent storyline. However later on the original story of Warcraft was mercilessly altered, including stuff like Garona was suddenly not a half-orc/half-human but half-orc/half-draenei when the need to bake the draenei into the background arose, or something like that.

I never played any of the WoW games, this is not my genre, and Warcraft III felt more like a disappointment to me. I love Warcraft II, but the third game was completely unlike the previous two in every aspect, not only concerning the storyline or setting but how it plays too. I did read WoW plot synopses at Blizzard's website and WoWWiki entries concerning both the plot of the game and background stories as established by spin-offs. At some point the sheer amount of retroactive changes to the original premises of the plot just made me realise I didn't care anymore. It stopped being "oh, that's an interesting plot twist" or "I didn't know that" and became a feeling that the authors just can make any change they want for reasons that are too often far from obvious, with no evident entertaining or aesthetic value of these changes to me as a consumer. It's easier to shrug off the new inventions and consider them something completely different to the original stuff I'm used to, than to try wrapping your head around all the retcons and vast amounts of new content that actually doesn't add anything to the original experience.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with this kind of changes, it just fails to excite me. What actually bothers me much more is that Blizzard effectively completely discarded Warcraft: Orcs & Humans as a game that is not fun to play by today's standards. With such statements and the amount of retcon, it's kind of hard for me to think of the first two Warcraft games and the rest of the series as a single, consistent franchise. It's more like someone else, unrelated to the Blizzard that did the first two titles, took the original concepts, reimagined them in their own way and put into their games. And in some sense, this is true because many of the people who took part in the creation of the original games are no longer on Blizzard's team.

The main problem of the Warcraft movie is that its story cries for a sequel, which as of today isn't very likely.

Hmm, why do you say that? I was under the impression the movie made enough money to cover expenses. The production costs were $160mil but they made $433mil. I understand it is not all about the money of course.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=warcraft.htm

vladstamate wrote:

Hmm, why do you say that?

There were some rumors few months ago that it's not happening.

They probably should've launched the sequel by know. The whole franchise is dying and there are other genres that people are more interested in these days.

What about the novels? Are they bad as the film?

They are ok. I've read a few. Again, they are for insiders mostly.

For comparison I also read Warhammer 40K and I can say that the Horus Heresy ones are better written (from literature point of view) than the Warcraft ones.

If you want to know more about the warcraft lore, they are decent.