Imagine if star wars started on the phantom menace, lord of the rings starting on the hobbit or harry potter starting on fantastic beast.
You always start at the good stuff then go back to tell the boring prequel stuff.
8 Likes
The movie failed because it was a bad movie
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Warcraft 1 IS the good stuff, though. Starting in WC 3 could be really overwhelming for people not familiar with the series. WC1 was simpler and a better place to start.
Lord of the Clans may have been the perfect place to start a movie, though. A simple story without a lot of the extra races and stuff to ease viewers into the world.
4 Likes
Warcraft 1 is hot garbage.
A lot of people didn’t start till warcraft 3 or WoW
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WarCraft 1 is a fine place to start, even a good one. It grounds the whole thing. The notion that the mistake the movie made was starting with WC 1 is flawed.
Real problems with the movie:
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Few character building scenes on the human side: Amazingly, the CGI enhanced Durotan and orc cast got more character development than the characters who just needed costumes. King Llane seemed bored. Lothar had a father-son story awkwardly shoe-horned in, but virtually no scenes with his son to build any kind of emotional investment when his son died. (Sidenote: the son’s last words being “for Azeroth” added dumb dialogue to the mix - the world is not united, the characters should not feel emotionally charged by referencing the world, especially when he’s literally dying to protect the king. If ever a moment in the movie called out for a human to die while calling out “for the king!” that was it). There was no sense of what these characters personalities are like when they’re not knee-deep in trying to solve the orc mystery. The humans just had no significant good relationship scenes binding them to each other the way the orcs did, which is just mind-boggling when you consider how expensive those orc scenes were to produce.
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Dumb riddle side story. Khadgar is trying to figure out a dumb riddle, which is not really a riddle and really has no meaning, just so we can see him “level up” at Karazhan while fighting Medivh. The trip to Dalaran felt pointless. The weird encounter with Alodi was unnecessary. He goes to Dalaran to inform them that the Guardian has turned on the world and there’s an invasion, and what does Dalaran do? Exactly nothing. They send zero aid in the final battle. But not in any explained way, it’s like they just forgot they had this story about warning Dalaran when they were filming the final confrontation. This was wasted screen time that could have been put to much better use by building character scenes with Llane, Khadgar, and Lothar (who get maybe one decent character scene when they camp at night).
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Medivh. The movie had zero clue what to do with him. This guy needed serious character development, because he was driving everything with his actions. In the game lore, he was best friends with Lothar and Llane, who grew up with him. In the movie, you don’t get much of any sense of past friendship. In the game lore, the “Guardian” role has an explanation to it. The movie gives no explanation. Why is this one human so insanely powerful? The audience doesn’t know, and it makes everything feel awkward and weird, because there’s little grounding to what it means for the Guardian to be corrupted.
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And now The Big One. This next thing is the single, dumbest handling of a critical fixture in the entire movie. I’m fine with all sorts of changes from the game lore. I expect many changes from the game lore because the game lore can get pretty silly or convoluted at times. But starting out with WarCraft 1 had one major, cinematic justification for the WarCraft franchise, and they absolutely blew it. This is the one thing that, whatever other changes they would make, they really couldn’t change without losing the soul of the story: The whole point of WarCraft 1 is that Stormwind loses, it falls to the Horde, and their refugees flee to Lordaeron where the fall of Stormwind acts as a wake-up call to the other human nations, dwarves, high elves, and gnomes that they need to unite or they’ll suffer the same fate as mighty Stormwind. Their failure to aid Stormwind, and its fall, is meant to be a backdrop to why the Alliance forms in the first place. And what happens? They end the movie with Stormwind WINNING.
They drive the Horde back, they destroy the Dark Portal, zero re-enforcements from any other nation come to aid them. So why does the Alliance form? I don’t know. I guess for the same reason that nations might vote for some non-binding feel-good UN resolution in our world. There’s no weight to the end of this movie or the formation of the Alliance, because Stormwind already took care of the problem on their own. “For the Alliance” being shouted by the army and crowd falls 100% flat in the end due to this decision.
The WarCraft film was a disaster. But it wasn’t because they started with WarCraft 1. It’s because they didn’t build the human characters into people with real personalities who the audience could invest in, they wasted screen time on utterly pointless side-trips that had no story payoff (trip to Dalaran), they couldn’t come up with a coherent exposition for the Guardian plot, and they undermined the central emotional feature of the WarCraft 1 timeline by having Stormwind win and destroy the Dark Portal on their own.
19 Likes
starting from the beginning isnt a flawed idea. The issue is that this franchise does not translate into a movie very well at all. It would be much better served as an animated tv series.
Each season being a different game. Once we get to the WoW era each expansion would be its own season. What this allows is to take the lore and use it to its’ full potential. It could even be used to expand on existing lore to show the more minute details of the story instead of just getting the overall events of what happened.
2 Likes
it should have been a TV series not a movie… There is so much back story you need to bring it out gradually while telling smaller stories.
even if it was animated instead of CGI the possibilities were endless
2 Likes
Yeah the movie was just bad
It has bad writing and pooped all over the source material
There just was nothing good about the movie at all, and the only way to have fixed it was to pick a good movie director (like Peter Jackson) and let him work the material as needed.
I mean, I thought it was great and I re-watch it frequently. I hardly know the lore, so maybe that’s why folks are saying it’s bad?
1 Like
Yeah, the story about Sylvanas Windrunner alone would have carried the movie perfectly from start to finish.
The movie was just poo.
With that said out of all the events in warcraft they picked quite possibly one of the most boring events to show. If they would have picked the second or third war conflicts it would have been so much better.
I mean could you imagine an arthus movie? Or a movie about Madive?
Lol. “The Hobbit” was a way better Book than, “The fellowship of the ring”. The movie serises should have made “The Hobbit” first. The movie for fellowship is almost to long and borring to watch.
You know why it failed? Because the dwarves looked stupid. Seriously they look like they’ve been under that mountain doing several generations of inbreeding.
That being said, out of all the video game movies I’ve seen ( doom and Bloodrayne shudders) it was the better movie.
I was just a sub-par movie, no matter the story, if the script and direction are good, the movie will shine on it’s own merit. Problem is that they attempted to clump up just waaaay too much lore into less than two hours of film and it ends up being confusing even for the more lore savy.
A Netflix series would be the correct format.
Their choice of director killed the movie. He wanted to tell a story compassionate to the ORC Horde bent on wiping Stormwind off the face of the planet. He failed in that and telling the actual story of Warcraft. If they had stuck to the story, it would have been better.
This is the most flawed logic I’ve seen on these boards in a long time.
Besides, the movie wasn’t even that bad. It was a pretty faithful adaption. It’s just American’s don’t care and want to see a Warcraft movie.
It doesn’t matter what plot it’s based off of, including Arthas. It would have sunk anyways.
I thought it was how badly written it was… that and it was extremely hard to tell most of the orcs apart.
They tried so hard to make the horde neutral that it stopped making sense about 10mins in.
I also felt there was a lot of name dropping.
Which might be good for fans of the franchise, but just confusing for the typical movie-goer.
There was so little character development or background in the movie, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
It failed because they crammed 3 movies worth of story into 1.