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I
mention all of this because I saw Warcraft: The Beginning
yesterday and, in honesty, I
thought it was pretty rubbish. However, unlike with Bay, I'm deprived
the chance of a 'bad film rant' because I'm a fan of the man at the
top. Duncan Jones has made two films previous to this and both were
fucking brilliant. Just look at his first film Moon, for
example. Not only is it one of the best sci-fi movies of the last
fifteen years but it also features Sam Rockwell. I mean, Rockwell is
an amazing actor that's just not in enough films as it is, which
admittedly is something that I'd still say if he was in every film
with the exception of one. Jones not only realised this but seems to
be the only person smart enough to also realise that if one Sam
Rockwell is good, then two Sam Rockwells and basically no other cast
is fucking perfect. In his second film Source Code, Jones
decided to see what would happen if you took the concept of Groundhog
Day and turned it into a
Hitchcockian slab of sci-fi brilliance. All that effort, when in
reality, if you wanted to improve Groundhog Day, then
all you'd need to do is recast Andie 'is it raining? I hadn't
noticed' McDowell.
It's
therefore a shame to report that Warcraft: The Beginning
was pretty fucking terrible,
because as a fan of Jones, I thought he'd be the person to break the
'movies based on computer games are shit' curse. I suppose it's also
worth mentioning that I've literally never played a single second of
the game of which this film is based. To be honest, I didn't even know
that Warcraft and
World Of Warcraft were
two separate games until my mate starting telling me about them and I
was forced to zone out of the conversation. In fact, the only
thing I really know about the property is that a weird sweatshop
thing was once found in which people were being forced to play for
hours on end. I think they were collecting things in the game that
were then sold on to other people. However the conditions were so bad
that they literally weren't even allowed to leave to go to the toilet
and were instead forced to wear nappies and shit their pants in front
of each other. A mean-spirited person might suggest that a lot of
that shit ended up in the boring script for this movie here, but I'm
not being a mean-spirited person. Plus I'm pretty sure that all that
shit had probably all already been used up for the Transformers:
Dark Of The Moon script.
Still,
it almost definitely is the script that's the problem for Warcraft:
The Beginning. To start with,
literally every single character in the movie speaks absolute
gibberish. So you'll have an orc named Fingle-Fangle screaming about
how he needs to get to the Dipsy-Funk before Lord Tittle of Drimble
can put the Gurnie Curse on him. I mean, obviously I've just made that
shit up, but it's not a million miles away from what's in the movie.
Maybe if you've played the game then all of that will make sense but
I don't think that I should have to spend 800 hours of my life
playing something in order to understand a stand-alone movie. Plus if
I'm going to spend 800 hours of my life on a computer then I'm not
going to spend it pretending to be a fucking orc. Not whilst we live
in a world in which porn exists, anyway. Sadly, rather than something
of class, these knobbish-nouns put Warcraft
nearer to the feel of John Carter, which
is a travesty of a film in which the word 'tedium' was clearly their
key inspiration.
I
suppose you could argue that it's the same with Star Wars
too, in which if you didn't know
any better you might think that a 'jedi' is something that you catch
after having somebody fart on your pillow. But the one thing that
Star Wars had in its
favour was Han Solo. Whenever anybody said anything that sounded
hokey, he was there as the audience's voice to call them out on their
shit. In which case, perhaps you could argue that The Lord
Of The Rings also involves
people using stupid words with an overly straight-face... however the
difference here is that that franchise used good actors and had really strong characters. X-Men's Magneto
as a wizard with a pointy hat? Sounds great to me. X-Men
3's Angel as a wizard in a
shitty dressing gown? Meh.. not so much. Perhaps the other thing that
Lord Of The Rings did
was give us a good hour of just a birthday party before any of the
shit went down. It might have seemed indulgent at the time but it
gave us a glimpse at the various characters' humanity and a hint at
the life that they'll ultimately be fighting to save. Beyond the fact
that they are defending their world from the invading orcs, do we
really know anything about any one of the human characters in
Warcraft? The only
thing that I can think of is that they're all either crap at emoting
or are simply made of fucking wood.
However
on the bright-side, that's only true of the human half of the movie.
One of the interesting things that Warcraft: The Beginning
does attempt to do is to break
down the cliché of goodies versus baddies and instead depict the
complexities of desperation and war. Sort of. Do I believe that
Michael Bay is like Hitler? Of course. However do I believe that all
Nazis were evil? Of course not. Well, the same is true in Warcraft
in which both sides are shown to
have their nice guys and their turd-nuggets. As a result, the main orc
whose name I don't remember is actually a pretty enjoyable character.
I was also pretty impressed with the way in which his story resolved
itself which seemed pretty novel for a mainstream movie. It's also
worth saying that the CG here is insanely good. This includes the
world in general but I suppose I'm specifically referring now to the
orcs. Did they use computer effects to create the orcs or did they
simply stick steroids into the secret survivors of Chernobyl? Either
way I believed what I saw. The only problem again is that a lot of
the orcs looked kind of similar and also had those Timble The
FudgeSlayer-styled stupid fucking names, so it was pretty easy to
lose track of who was doing what and to who. I guess at the very
least, my inability to distinguish those characters gave me some
insight into how it might be to be a real world racist.
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