Warcraft: The Movie

Mickeroo · 17-06-2016 12:49pm

I got the polymorph one because of hearthstone

When was the murloc bit? And there was a Leroy Jenkins reference?

TheDoc · 17-06-2016 12:53pm

Mickeroo wrote: »

I got the polymorph one because of hearthstone When was the murloc bit? And there was a Leroy Jenkins reference?

When Khadghar was being brought to Goldshire, they went over a bridge where a murloc was in the foreground, and made the murloc noise.

Heard there was someone who shouted Leroy jenkins, missed it myself

G.Ames · 17-06-2016 1:23pm

I haven't read the books nor played the games. I've watched it two days ago at the cinema.
In my opinion it all went a bit to fast for people who know little about the background story.
Also Characters were inserted and then ignored.

But the film makes you want more, beause there are a few questions that will be answered in the second film.

Looper007 · 20-06-2016 5:22am

Not a fan of the Warcraft games or lore, but I have to say the critics have been very harsh on this. Thought Duncan jones did a great job in making a rather bleak film at times, even the ending got me pumped and wanting more.

FunLover18 · 20-06-2016 9:44pm

Never played the game but I didn't think this was too bad. As an introductory film I think it did a good job at introducing audiences to the worlds at play. The CGI was good, as was the acting and overall I would definitely go see a sequel. The only thing that really bothered me was how clean everything and everyone looked.

Tzardine · 22-06-2016 3:18pm

I went to see it yesterday. (Thanks bargain alerts for the code. Ticket cost me €3) I had the whole cinema to myself

I enjoyed it. The reviews are off the wall. It's not the best film in the world but it's not a 2/10 either. Don't know where they got that.

spintheglobe · 24-06-2016 4:16pm

I was really disappointed by this movie

e_e · 24-06-2016 6:06pm

spintheglobe wrote: »

I was really disappointed by this movie

Same, I bought into the narrative of "the critics are wrong, it's a really good movie" and was left completely cold and bored by it. It's not a terrible movie by any means, it's just one that feels like it had a completely bypass of personality and vision. It almost had the sense of the Star Wars prequels and the Hobbit trilogy of "okay let's get this over with". It really felt like a big turgid corporate machine of a movie to me despite Jones' admirable efforts.

Gbear · 17-07-2016 9:40am

Saw this last night.

I don't think it felt like it was designed by committee, or that it lacked soul.
I thought it was really well intentioned, physically very pretty, fairly well cast, sounded great, well choreographed and at it's core had a good story.

It fell down in a few areas.
The editing was just a nightmare. I'm sure the Marvel films end up having loads of scenes and parts of scenes cut but they tend to flow perfectly fine and you wouldn't really notice what was missing.
Maybe it was Jones' first time in this kind of situation where he had to leave so much work on the cutting room floor but so many edits were incredibly jarring. It seems like there was a lack of planning for how they were going to shorten the film from the outset and the changes were done on the fly at the last minute.
It was most obvious in the beginning while establishing the human plot where there's about 8 cuts between a load of scenes that are compltely pointless and could instead have been delievered in 1 scene in Stormwind.

I feel like they were going for some kind of easy-going, casual delivery, in contrast to the more booming lyricism of LotR, but it just ended up sounding wooden and mumbly in many cases.
The dialogue for the orcs was fine as far as i can remember, and in general the writing was fine, but some of the delivery by the humans was just strange and I don't understand how they made it through production intact.
Fimmel wasn't as bad as he looked in the trailers but most of the scenes in question involved him and someone else.

Also, having a few audible nods to the games is fine, like the murloc "wargrrrble", but Wilhelm screams are just a massive no-no.

It's hard for me to judge the approachability of this film to non Warcraft fans. I've never playe WoW but I do love the RTS. It didn't seem to overburden people with trivia and lore, and most of it was delivered with a light touch, showing rather than saying, like Grom Hellscream, Gorehowl, the Doomhammer, referencing Mannoroth but not going on about the demons specifically... I feel like they made the world(s) come alive for fans and ought to have for newbies as well.

All in all it was decent and I hope we see a sequel, preferably with Jones again, perhaps with a few lessons learned from this one.
It's a shame, because seeing what they came up with, I don't think they were a million miles away and the failures were more technical than intrinsic to the IP.
I would like to see a director's cut before I make final judgement on the work Jones did, but you have to judge it first and foremost on the way it was originally released.

squonk · 18-07-2016 11:31am

I saw it a few weeks ago. Not the greatest film, not the worst either. I hadn't played WoW and knew little about it going in. The first part of the film didn't make much sense I thought. It definitely improved up in the second half. The acting was wooden enough at times but I'd have no bother if they made more, whether I'd go see a sequel or not I dont know but probably not, unless I was dragged along. Honestly my abiding memory of the movie is of a bit of a mess generally but saved by a stronger home stretch.

Duggy747 · 18-07-2016 2:29pm

Not great but in no way is it a bad film or a horrendous watch, easily the best video game movie I've seen and one I'd count on being the film that broke that curse. The action scenes were enjoyable and the CGI was well done for the most part, the orcs especially since at times I'd forget I was looking at CG characters.

The editing was horrific in parts though, you can tell how they chopped this up so they could get it down to it's current running time. People and scenes suddenly transporting all over the place where you'd initially think did you just pass out and come to again a few minutes later.

Some of the cuts made no sense and were extremely sudden like they were made 5 minutes before the final cut had to be issued, a Director's Cut should be able to clean this film up a lot more.

Watched it with a bunch of people and we were all entertained by it, despite none of us knowing anything about the Warcraft universe.

Definitely doesn't deserve it's 29% RT rating, I think Jones made an admirable effort.

Gbear · 20-07-2016 8:45pm

It's slightly disappointing in this thread that the extent to which the film has been discussed has mostly been where it falls between utter garbage and decent.
Surface level mostly.

Thinking back on it, I only cared about 2, maybe 3 characters - Durotan, Garona and Lothar.

Nothing wrong at all with Durotan. It was by any standards a good character, well acted, CGI'd out of the park. Great. Then they killed him. Sad face.

Fimmell didn't exactly give a masterclass in oration, but physically he looked haggard, on edge and played it quite well from that perspective, I thought.
His dialogue was average and his delivery didn't make it any better, but he looked the part and managed to convey a lot just by how he carried himself. His story is pretty much the only thing that could be carried into the next film from a plot perspective.

As I remember him, he's a haggard, bitter old coot by the time WC2 comes around and you can see how he would get there. Garona ****ed him over, his king's dead, his best friend betrayed him, Gul Dan is still about with a sizable body of orcs.

Any prospective sequel could see him being a warmonger while Garona is pushing for peace from the other side, but alas, it all goes to ****, presumably, because a story about how everything goes grand wouldn't amount to an epic fantasy film.

I liked the way the plot went. Maybe there aren't any non-clichés left in fantasy, but it wrapped up quite nicely. On the one hand, nearly the entire cast died, which is disappointing insofar as some characters were nice having around, but it also frees any sequel to spin the wheel again with a nearly completely different cast.
3 of the 4 main characters - Khadgar, Garona and Lothar survived, but the bulk of the supporting cast were killed.

pixelburp · 06-09-2016 4:20pm

Got a chance to finally watch this and while I was surprised to find it wasn't half as bad as reviews made it sound, it was still not in of itself a good film; in fact, divorced of the overall bad press, Warcraft wasn't so much ostensibly bad as it was utterly boring and without an ounce of charm; this primarily caused I think by the presumptuous decision to script the film as a primer for sequels, instead of starting as a standalone blockbuster first. This wasn't a unique decision either, as currently it feels like every studio desperately wants their own cinematic universe, the multi-film cash-cow that'll keep the profits up & so scripts can come across pretty desperate in their attempts to foreshadow a sequel without paying their way first. The culmination being that Warcraft's ending felt less like 'to be continued...' and more like 'tune in next week'.

Also, for a film with a $160 million dollar budget, it looked distractingly cheap and phoney - and I'm not just talking about the CGI orcs. The entire world had a constant, plastic unreality to it all; few of the sets or props looking remotely convincing, stone walls appearing flat and painted, and little felt like a real, lived-in space. Ironically though, the most fleshed out character was the computer-generated one, Toby Kebbell giving Durotan a despairing and worried heroism while surrounded by clichés and ciphers. The humans were barely there; just names and faces you recognise from here & there on TV.

Fundamentally though, the main problem comes back to the concept of game adaptations: Warcraft was the film to finally convince me that Games just don't work on Film. Without that extra medium of the player, the person controlling & directing the experience - the thing that often directly affects a game's narrative in the first place - said narratives often come across as derivative at best, and just plain juvenile at worst & Warcraft was no exception. The game clearly has its fans and makes Blizzard a colossal amount of money, but as a standalone story, its world is a bland cribbing of Tolkien high-fantasy, laid bare without the player's input generating their own personal stories.

Gbear · 06-09-2016 7:09pm

pixelburp wrote: »

Fundamentally though, the main problem comes back to the concept of game adaptations: Warcraft was the film to finally convince me that Games just don't work on Film. Without that extra medium of the player, the person controlling & directing the experience - the thing that often directly affects a game's narrative in the first place - said narratives often come across as derivative at best, and just plain juvenile at worst & Warcraft was no exception. The game clearly has its fans and makes Blizzard a colossal amount of money, but as a standalone story, its world is a bland cribbing of Tolkien high-fantasy, laid bare without the player's input generating their own personal stories.

One of those groups are stories made by people who write stories for a living.

The other are stories made by people who write computer programs for a living.

Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo - they did pretty well, all things told considering their backgrounds.
It would've been some kind of astonishing coincidence for the lads at Blizzard to also be world class writers.

I think Chris Metzen is mostly in charge of that end of things and he's a good artist if nothing else.
Something that hasn't slowed down much is how stories are presented, interesting moves in artistic direction and obviously graphical fidelity, and these can help string you along if the writing isn't up to much or the plot is a string of clichés.

There were some of those novel elements and I thought the Orcs at least were worthy enough of putting the effort in to watch it.

16-02-2020 2:11am

Never saw this in the cinema so watched it on tv there. Way better than i was expecting. Lol @ the polymorph
Was always weak on the lore but got most of what was going on

FOR THE HORDE

beauf · 16-02-2020 2:47am

I know nothing of Warcraft. But I enjoyed this movie. I know it's nothing amazing but it was ok. It's probably trying to cover too much material too thinly. But I didn't really mind.

Riddle101 · 16-02-2020 4:55am

bluewolf wrote: »

Never saw this in the cinema so watched it on tv there. Way better than i was expecting. Lol @ the polymorph
Was always weak on the lore but got most of what was going on

FOR THE HORDE

I would have liked to have seen a sequel but it doesn't look like it's going to happen. Kind've a waste really since the Warcraft movie ended with the intention of a sequel.

https://segmentnext.com/2019/07/19/warcraft-movie-will-have-no-sequel-duncan-jones/

Varik · 16-02-2020 6:37pm

Ye wish there was sequel.

Maybe we will at some point, we've gotten a successful Pokemon and now Sonic movie. Maybe they'll try again.

pixelburp · 16-02-2020 11:33pm

They should have pitched an Amazon or Netflix show, instead going for the greedy option of that blockbuster money. Spent way too long setting up a sequel instead of telling a good, standalone story and not surprised it tanked TBH.

nix · 17-02-2020 4:23pm

pixelburp wrote: »

They should have pitched an Amazon or Netflix show, instead going for the greedy option of that blockbuster money. Spent way too long setting up a sequel instead of telling a good, standalone story and not surprised it tanked TBH.

Wasnt really the done thing back then though, but yeah, it would be much better to do it as a series instead of a movie. They could do a lot with an animated series tbh, alota great lore to be told..

pixelburp · 17-02-2020 5:13pm

"Back then"??

The movie's only 3 years old, hardly prehistoric even by the era of Streaming, so not sure how different you're reckoning the TV landscape was. The Witcher was announced only a year afterwards on Netflix for instance, while Game of Thrones was in its sixth season.

Totally academic anyway, the film was a flop, and not an unearned one either IMO.

Homelander · 17-02-2020 5:25pm

Never played Warcraft but I thought it was a pretty OK movie and an entertaining fantasy adventure, definitely above average in terms of video game movies which are usually complete disasters.

I don't think it was a flop at all, just not successful enough for them to make a sequel. Budget: $160M. BO: $440m. Even if we assume that marketing and all that stuff was the same as the production, it still would be well clear of being a flop even just in terms of cinema run.

Varik · 17-02-2020 11:16pm

Homelander wrote: »

Never played Warcraft but I thought it was a pretty OK movie and an entertaining fantasy adventure, definitely above average in terms of video game movies which are usually complete disasters.

I don't think it was a flop at all, just not successful enough for them to make a sequel. Budget: $160M. BO: $440m. Even if we assume that marketing and all that stuff was the same as the production, it still would be well clear of being a flop even just in terms of cinema run.

Made decent money in China too compare to a lot of films, had more potential there. Wow is big there too or was at least, big enough for a fake WOW theme park to be built.

nix · 18-02-2020 1:57am

pixelburp wrote: »

"Back then"??

The movie's only 3 years old, hardly prehistoric even by the era of Streaming, IMO.

Well they started making the movie in Jan 2014, whether its going to netflix or cinema is usually decided before or around then id imagine.

Netflix only started doing movies in 2015, and even then there wasnt many and they were lower budget compared to Warcraft. Prior to that it was shows only, their first netflix original was house of cards in 2013.. So yeah "back then" as far as all thats concerned

I'm trying to remember when exactly movie companies started ****ting bricks and put the movie on netflix instead of the cinema, theres a specific movie that opened that flood gate, its on the tip of my tongue.. but i cant recall for now

Duckworth_Luas · 21-02-2020 3:42am

nix wrote: »

I'm trying to remember when exactly movie companies started ****ting bricks and put the movie on netflix instead of the cinema, theres a specific movie that opened that flood gate, its on the tip of my tongue.. but i cant recall for now

Was it Bright?

nix · 21-02-2020 6:49pm

Duckworth_Luas wrote: »

Was it Bright?

No pretty sure that was made by netflix themselves, a movie that comes to mind is The Cloverfield Paradox, that was bought by netflix from paramount for its eventual release but im pretty sure there was another before that one..

Warcraft: The Movie

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