It was a clear miss.
Why the hell would you make a Warcraft movie about the first war? It’s not a story a lot of people care about, and it wasnt even presented in a compelling or accurate to lore way.
I want to see the Arthas movie, give me that and we got something epic.
Always felt like the Warcraft film was poorly timed, and didn’t get a fair shake. My wife and I enjoyed it, and the effects/acting wasn’t bad. Would definitely have liked to see a sequel addressing the Beyond the Dark Portal story.
The fact Blizz hung so much of WoD on the film’s release and flop ended up pretty much killing that expansion abruptly.
It was ok. I didn’t watch it for several months after it came out, but it was decent. I don’t know how much of that was nostalgia and the “hey it’s that guy!” factor, but I’m sure that helped.
There were some continuity issues though, like accents being seemingly random.
I rank it up there with Seinfeld and Friends.
I would never sit down and watch them, but if I was doing house chores I’d leave it on for background noise.
I own it on my vudu account and oddly enough I just rewatched it last month after not seeing it for a couple years.
I agree with most I don’t like the story they chose to go with, especially with all the lore Warcraft has to take from. It’s my opinion that is what hurt the film the most.
I liked how the orcs look I think that’s the best cgi in the film.
Actors were ok . But the script wasn’t the best because of the poor story. So I cut the actors a slight break for mediocre writing.
Paula and Travis are actually good actors IMO.
Supposedly the script in fact was changed late in the process of making the film. I wonder what the original story was?
At any rate I feel the movie embarrassed blizzard and legendary so I doubt another one will be made again….ever.
My final comment is LOTR set the bar high for fantasy movies so much so it’s very hard for us to judge another one “good”
I hope the new D&D film isn’t an embarrassment when it releases next year.
Eh, I don’t know if I’d go THAT far. WoD on its own had plenty of issues, and while every expansion has had cut content in one way or another, none of them top WoD in that regard.
Well, if there is one thing Blizzard has always done, it’s give shout outs and repurpose names. Don’t forget: Anduin is a name with origins in the Sindarin language that Tolkien had created for his various Middle Earth works.
Very true.
And while I’ve made it seem like it was fairly easy to get LotR onto the screen, it actually wasn’t. Up until Jackson came along, it too was considered one of those “unadaptable” works. Hell, up until he reached out to New Line, just about every studio balked at the idea of all three films done concurrently mainly due to the sheer expense of such an undertaking. A few even told Jackson they’d fund it if he could cut it down to two films instead of three.
Of course, the key difference with LotR is the fact that it was written in a manner where you didn’t need huge infodumps every five minutes. While it was still lore dense, that alone really made it so much easier to adapt to the screen in my mind.
As far as CoN goes, if the Christian connections are as big as you suggest, then yeah. Good luck getting Hollyweird to sign up for that without wanting to make huge changes.
Never thought of it that way, but I suppose that does make a ton of sense.
Fantasy films in general are typically seen as being very hokey. LotR came along and set a very high bar in that regard. Ever since then, many other companies have been trying to make the next LotR in terms of success.
I’d say Game of Thrones came close before falling off in the final season. It seems to me that the moment they ran out of Martin’s material is generally when folks feel it started to go downhill (and let’s be real: he’s likely never finishing that series as he purposely set out to make it hard to adapt, likely due to some of the reasons other adaptations have failed)
Past that one example however, it seems that many of the other recent attempts are too focused on nonsense not related/important to the story. Too many of these companies are just too damn focused on making a statement at this point 
I feel sick every time I think about giving the movie another try.
Lewis was a strange bird. He was an observational columnist, he was a fantasy writer, but he was also a Christian apologeticist. He would weave the three into his works all the time, many of them converted to plays or frequently TV adaptations (“The Screwtape Letters” for instance). He was a one-time atheist who Tolkein helped convert to Christianity.
As writers, he and Tolkein were similar in what they produced, but they were very different in how they did it. Tolkein was incredibly methodical, often rewriting the same work dozens of times to get what he wanted. Lewis wrote the entire seven-book Narnia series in less than seven years and did it while also writing other things.
Lewis was a literary master of swapping between first, second and third person in his writings. That is incredibly hard to do, especially writing in second person. It’s either a talent someone has, or they just don’t. There’s also the issue that Tolkein aimed LotR at young adults and up; Lewis specifically aimed a bit lower, making it for elementary students and preteens primarily but he also wanted it to be appreciated by adult readers.
All of this makes Narnia hard to translate onto the screen, because while the Narnia books are shorter and breezier than LotR in a lot of ways, the conversational way Lewis writes works really well on paper but suffers sometimes when in the form of a movie. It also doesn’t help that Lewis wrote them out of sequence. The sixth book of the series, “The Magician’s Nephew,” takes place several hundred years before the leadoff book, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” I’ve already talked about how the series can be a bit boggy in the middle, too, especially with “The Silver Chair,” which is also the longest in the series.
In regard to allegory, “The Last Battle” is based heavily on the concept of judgment day as described in the Book of Revelations. The character of Aslan the Lion is pretty much a stand-in for Jesus Christ. The twist in the book (and I hate to give it away here, so I won’t completely) is the outcome of the battle referenced in the title of the book. It’s not going to make a lot of sense unless you’ve at least read the first couple of books in the series first. But if you have, it leads to one of the most memorable endings of a story that I can remember.
Especially since I came out during WoD and it was kinda confusing keeping the story straight
I love World of Warcraft and bought the movie, but to be frank it was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. The acting in parts of the movie was absolutely atrocious.
I watched it with my nephew who at the time was 9. He really liked it, I was more happy watching his reactions than the actual movie. The movie was extremely goofy, I’ve seen worse though.
WarCraft 1 being the setting is not the problem. It could have been a great natural place to start, but in the end everything still depends on having writing and casting for individual characters to draw an audience in. The character writing was just bad. The casting (on the human side) was also not good.
Also, everyone should pause for a moment to reflect on the fact that one of the biggest benefits to starting at WarCraft 1 is that you’ve got an unconventional ending (the humans lose) that sets up a strong need for a sequel. That doesn’t mean the good guys can’t have their own climactic victories, but it can happen in the context of an overall loss of the war. (Imagine a WarCraft 1 movie where the climax is the fall of Stormwind, and Lothar is racing to save the young prince Varian during the fall).
The fall of Stormwind adds fantastic dramatic tension for the creation of the Alliance and the looming threat of the Horde over the rest of the world. Just watch this old, old cinematic to the second RTS (mid-1990’s vintage). As cheesy as the old computer music is, and as bad as the graphics are, it still manages to give a sense of how Stormwind being destroyed pumps you up for this new “Alliance” that’s supposed to turn the tide.
With the movie we got, you don’t have the opportunity for this kind of sequel set-up. In the movie, the first war ended with a parade for the victorious humans.
They didn’t go through the loss of Stormwind, fleeing across the ocean, almost having Lordaeron’s capital taken, turning things around, returning across the ocean to Stormwind and fighting to the portal.
By having Llane succeed in destroying the portal in the first war, you also lose the cathartic-climax of the humans finally getting to destroy the dark portal as a triumphant army at the end of the second entry.
Yes, these are very cheesy cinematics when compared to the massive jump in quality of WC3, but it gives you a sense of the cinematic foundation of “Horde vs. Alliance” that the franchise was built on. WC 3 goes in a direction of, “Actually, Horde vs. Alliance is a distraction from the REAL threat.” That’s great for a third act in a franchise built off of rivalry, but arguably WC 1 really is the naturally best place to start.
But obviously not with the writing team this movie had. If they had been handed WC 3 as the time setting, I guarantee they’d have butchered it just as badly.
It was a pretty decent movie based on a video game but just a so-so fantasy movie. I did enjoy it, however.
The movie made a lot of mistakes. I think it should most certainly NOT have been based on an RTS game from 1994 that was considered very OK full of lore that most of their built in audience for the IP doesn’t really have a connection with.
“Oh look, that’s Lothar and King Llane!.”
“Who?”
“Oh, They both died like 20 years before WoW… oops spoiler alert… I mostly remember him telling me to build more farms.”
Why wasn’t it made using WC3 or WoW? Were they hoping to have a full series with sequels for WC2, WC2 Beyond the dark portal, WC3, WC3 Tides of Vengeance, WC3 Frozen Throne, maybe a Sylvanas spinoff series to make Danuser happy… Well they certainly Effed up.
Horrible movie. Of course, if you want story you can do a hell of a lot better than this nonsense.
It was okay, but I’m sure purists had a conniption.
They really should’ve started with the WoW story for more appeal and gone from there. Once (if) a movie franchise stood on it’s own, then they could’ve walked the story back and done some origination stuff.
That & gotten a better director that would’ve remained true.
I liked it for what it was, a tribute to the fans. I own it and have rewatched it. I wish they’d make more. Or do a league of legends style series.
That being said I totally get why it didn’t do super well. It wasn’t a great stand alone honestly.
Did not like. Tried to pack too much content into the movie. The Durotan vs. Gul’dan storyline was good. The Human half of the story was a mess. I didn’t care about the alliance characters at all.
The whole “Last Guardian” portion of the plot felt tacked-on.
I 100% agree with all this and basically what I said in my Wowhead response. I swear this isn’t an alt, lol.
The Durotan and Orgrim vs. Gul’dan and Blackhand was interesting in the movie and the human side was a hot mess. I got whiplash from hopping from location to location in the first like 6 minutes of the film.
Yeah, this has always been the sticky point with the various Narnia adaptations. Up to Silver Chair, it’s fairly standard fantasy trope, but Horse and His Boy was seriously written from a stereotypical and somewhat racist slant towards Middle Eastern culture. Magician’s Nephew is less problematic, but also has some very dated British examples that wouldn’t jibe well today.
Last Battle is abjectly a wanna-be Revelations with the “enemy” standing in for essentially the Islamic religion. There’s no good way to scrub that story without having to basically rewrite the entire premise. Lewis wasn’t super in your face about it, but there was definitely enough allegory and undertone to be specific.