I've never played Warcraft.
Couldn't care less about Warcraft.
I was drawn to see this $160 million film almost with a fascination that any studio would approve a $160,000,0000 budget on a project so DOA in theatres it just kind of collapsed into them on opening day.
So here we have the sequel hungry WARCRAFT: THE BEGINNING.
The ten second plot summary is that a massive horde of murderous Orcs is invading the planet Azeroth through a mysterious portal.
For some reason I couldn't be bothered to learn, there are also humans on the planet, including some very good actors of varying fame fighting to escape the cumbersome plot.
I'm not going to spend another word trying to describe the plot, but I'll make it easy for you. Take one third "Stargate", one-third "Lord of the Rings" and one-third "Krull", blend until confusing, drop in $160 million worth of state of the art motion capture and special effects and you have WARCRAFT.
I found myself actually liking bits and pieces of the spectacle in the second half, the special effects team is first rate.
Some of the actors survive. Travis Fimmel (Vikings) is fine as Lothar, Paula Patton is good as a female warrior, but poor Dominic Cooper and Ruth Negga are stranded. They are SO GOOD together in AMC's outstanding series "Preacher", but here they just stand looking at each other and spouting George Lucas level gibberish at green screens.
Director Duncan Jones is the son of David Bowie and has shown real talent in smaller films like "Moon", but he has a thankless job with this over-bloated misfire.
You want to kill the Orcs? Just gross $47 million total at the Box Office on a $160 million budget. Boom. Orcs and multitudes of other "Lord of the Rings" cloned species slayed.
A massive failure, WARCRAFT: THE BEGINNING is also THE END and gets a D.
And yes, I mentioned the budget six times because I see films costing one tenth of this budget that are 100 times more entertaining. Who greenlit this mess?
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