Warcraft movie: There might be spoilers from books and the games.

[Pliskin]

I thought "You can guess what happens" was pretty obvious, but apparently not

[Jon's Queen Consort]

7 minutes ago, Pliskin said:

I thought "You can guess what happens" was pretty obvious, but apparently not

Spoiler

I thought that he turned evil, created the whole mess because he was an idiot or something like that!

 

[Jon's Queen Consort]

@Pliskin Also just saw it on IMDB

Spoiler

Toby Kebbell is both Durotan and Antonidas? Does this has a reason in the movie? He is able to shapeshift or they couldn't have another actor?

 

[Pliskin]

I have no f***ing clue who

Spoiler

Antonidas is.

 

[Jon's Queen Consort]

1 minute ago, Pliskin said:

I have no f***ing clue who

  Hide contents

Antonidas is.

 

Spoiler

According to what I have read at Warcraft wikia he is a powerful human archmage who was the leader of Kirin Tor, a group of powerful mages.

[Pliskin]

Ok, I see who he is. But you should really stop spoiling yourself and just wait until you watch it? It's not really worth the obsessiveness.

[Jon's Queen Consort]

14 minutes ago, Pliskin said:

Ok, I see who he is. But you should really stop spoiling yourself and just wait until you watch it? It's not really worth the obsessiveness.

Well I am one of those people who want to be spoiled. Because I both don't like surprises, I despise them actually, and I want to determine if the movie worth to see in on a normal cinema, 3D or just wait for the DVD or BluRay.

Thank you tho

[JonCon's Red Beard]

 

6 hours ago, Jon's Queen Consort said:

Well I am one of those people who want to be spoiled. Because I both don't like surprises, I despise them actually, and I want to determine if the movie worth to see in on a normal cinema, 3D or just wait for the DVD or BluRay.

Thank you tho

I don't despite surprises, but sometimes, I'm ok. with spoilers too. I heard certain scene from XMA was the best in the movie, and I even watched it before going, and I'm glad I did bc then I could pay more attention to details.

[The Anti-Targ]

On 27/05/2016 at 8:46 PM, ambi76 said:

Waiting for it to go on DVD/freeTV is legit especially if you're not a squee-fan. But the utter trashing of it is absolutely unwarranted.

And what the fuck is it with the critics being salty about this not being LotR or GoT. Really?

How can you not get that a video game movie will be the exact opposite of GoT fantasy trope wise? Did a Nigerian Prince promise them great riches and that the Warcraft movie would be LotR 4? Those comparisons don't make one lick of sense. Oh wait, it all has the dreaded "fantasy" label so must all be the same?

http://www.scifinow.co.uk/reviews/warcraft-film-review-can-duncan-jones-break-the-videogame-movie-curse/

Not a single mention of LOTR or GoT. And this guy rates it a 2/5. I think most critics are saying it's simply not a good movie for a whole lot of different reasons. 

The bigger question now is whether this is a career limiting movie from Duncan Jones. Or will there still be a lot of good will from Moon and Source Code? 

[The Anti-Targ]

3 hours ago, JCRB's Honeypot said:

It appears that Duncan Jones made a movie that only game fans would love, mostly, and even some game fans won't love it. It's totally fine to make a movie for the fans, but when you do that you also make a movie that will fail financially unless you film on a relatively low budget.

Perhaps this movie will do fantastically well in markets where moviegoers are less concerned about plot and cohesion and just want to see great visuals and orcs fighting, and the movie will be a financial success. But I doubt it, the WoW fanbase isn't big enough to achieve that.

[Yawron]

11 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

It appears that Duncan Jones made a movie that only game fans would love, mostly, and even some game fans won't love it. It's totally fine to make a movie for the fans, but when you do that you also make a movie that will fail financially unless you film on a relatively low budget.

I liked the movie. I think I want to watch it again some time in the future. 

But I had moments when I thought to myself: "Cool, that looks like the game!" And that is maybe not the best thing in a movie..

[red snow]

12 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

http://www.scifinow.co.uk/reviews/warcraft-film-review-can-duncan-jones-break-the-videogame-movie-curse/

Not a single mention of LOTR or GoT. And this guy rates it a 2/5. I think most critics are saying it's simply not a good movie for a whole lot of different reasons. 

The bigger question now is whether this is a career limiting movie from Duncan Jones. Or will there still be a lot of good will from Moon and Source Code? 

I'm hoping he winds up more like Aronofsky (bad with a big budget, great with a small one) than Blomkamp (terrible since he was given bigger budgets). I doubt they'll let him near a big budget release for a while and any hope of him doing a star wars film has been knocked back.

It would be a massive shame if we don't see the proposed Moon sequel because of this.

[denstorebog]

I don't understand why Jones would get any goodwill from Source Code. It was by no stretch a good movie - it just wasn't a disaster either. Moon will always be a good movie, but so was The Usual Suspects, and I have zero respect for Bryan Singer as a filmmaker at this point. 

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

It would be nice if people who are White Knighting this film would not claim that critics or people who dislike this film don't know the subject matter or appreciate the film. As I said before, I'm not a new Blizzard fan. Unlike many of you younger pups, I actually played Warcraft 1: Orcs & Humans and remember how this same story was repeatedly retconned via Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft, and the various novelizations covering this time frame (i.e. The Last Guardian, The Rise of the Horde, etc.). I apologize for my upcoming mild spoilers. 

The editing and exposition of this film was poor. The Warcraft film requires too much foreknowledge from the audience to fill in the narrative gaps, and I suspect Warcraft fanboys don't mind because they can't recognize when they are subconsciously filling in those gaps. That's not a good thing. I remember taking my little sister to the first few Harry Potter films. When I went, I had not read any of the Harry Potter films, but it turned out that I didn't need to do so. The film had sufficient pacing, exposition, and narrative coherence. It was entertaining and fun. When I read the books, I learned what was left out, but the film could still stand on its own. That is similar with a number of book adaptations (e.g. LotR). But at the same time, there is not enough exposition in the right places. I went with my girlfriend and two of her friends, only one of whom plays Warcraft, and they found themselves somewhat confused by the film. The movie makes a big deal about "fel" magic, but does little to explain what it is apart from how it uses life energy. I managed to clarify that point to my friends with only one line: it's demonic magic. That's all I had to say, and suddenly they got it. 

There was too much fan service in the film, but sometimes that fan service made little narrative sense and only impeded the pacing, cuts, and coherence of the narrative. There was no reason, for example, for Anduin Lothar to be in Ironforge apart from showing Magni Bronzebeard and guns. There was no reason for Anduin Lothar to just show up in Stormwind for a bit of a scene just so he could be told that the king was in Goldshire. Why did the king need to be there? Why was he there instead of Stormwind? It was just one bad cut after another. 

Furthermore, why does this film need to establish an Alliance when the whole point of the First War was that there was no Alliance at all (and the nations of Lordaeron gave little shits about Stormwind's war with the orcs) if not for just blatant fan service? Didn't they learn anything from Star Wars Phantom Menace that senatorial discussions and such political meetings are a waste of the audience's time? Instead of that filler, fan service meeting, why not just have a line in which Anduin Lothar asks King Llane whether their requests for aid from the northern kingdoms of Lordaeron would be met. If you want to set up the idea of the Alliance, then you could create a contrast between King Llane's (lion) pride against the Alliance and the desire for Stormwind to handle this alone versus Anduin Lothar's pragmatic grounds-eye to the war making him aware of how big a threat the orcs present and his openness for allies. 

Furthermore, there were further story decisions that significantly slowed down the pacing and coherence of the plot. Anduin didn't need a son - something new to the movieverse - and that subplot was so woefully under developed with so little emotional investment that I had no reasons to care or feel anything during the story. It was a distraction from time that could have been spent more productively elsewhere, such as the aforementioned pacing, narrative coherence, or even just more action. Instead of showing Anduin's son, why wasn't there more footage showing Llane with his son Varian? Wouldn't that mean more for Llane's death and the Warcraft fan's knowledge of King Varian Wrynn?

Or why did Khadgar need to go Dalaran in the middle of the film? Just so we can see the anachronistically floating city of Dalaran and receive a jumbled incoherent explanation about the Guardian, Alodi, and was that supposed to be Aegwynn? In the retconned game and novelization, The Last Guardian, Khadgar gets sent by the Kirin Tor to be Medivh's apprentice. Wouldn't have following Khadgar going from Dalaran to Stormwind have provided a more coherent plot development that then allowed the audience to see the splendor of Stormwind for the first time with a greater sense of wonder while keeping the story's focus firmly in Stormwind? 

If you went into this movie thinking that you would see the First War, you would be sorely mistaken. You will instead be entreated to quick, blurry CGI fly overs of tiny CGI orcs raiding CGI villages and the occasional recognizable landmark - with little evidence of Stormwind putting up a defense - but you won't be seeing any real battles apart from just a handful of ambushes and an anticlimatic final battle and an even more anticlimatic final duel that seemed to exist just to give Lothar something to do. (And a duel that also removes one of the character-defining moments of another character.) 

I'm sorry, but sometimes you have to take fanboy glasses off so you can see this film for the epically cinematic turd that it really is. 

[The Anti-Targ]

2 hours ago, denstorebog said:

I don't understand why Jones would get any goodwill from Source Code. It was by no stretch a good movie - it just wasn't a disaster either. Moon will always be a good movie, but so was The Usual Suspects, and I have zero respect for Bryan Singer as a filmmaker at this point. 

As much as we like to think our opinions matter, the fact is Source Code was a critical and financial success (thanks to a low budget, but a financial success nonetheless), so in terms of industry cred with the people who might offer him a job it sits firmly in the plus column.

[polishgenius]

4 hours ago, denstorebog said:

I don't understand why Jones would get any goodwill from Source Code. It was by no stretch a good movie - it just wasn't a disaster either. Moon will always be a good movie, but so was The Usual Suspects, and I have zero respect for Bryan Singer as a filmmaker at this point. 

Source Code is a good movie for 90% of its length let down by a spectacularly careless ending. I think it's goodwill-y enough, but Warcraft is an entirely different sort of film. It's possible he'll learn from it - I'm certainly hoping Gareth Edwards had when he made a similar (albeit much huger) jump from Monsters to Godzilla and made a very average blockbuster.

That said, what impact this has on Jones' career will have little to do with critical reviews- despite being average, Godzilla made plenty of money, so Edwards got both a sequel and a Star Wars film. That could still happen here.

[williamjm]

39 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

That said, what impact this has on Jones' career will have little to do with critical reviews- despite being average, Godzilla made plenty of money, so Edwards got both a sequel and a Star Wars film. That could still happen here.

It seems the reviews are much more savage for Warcraft than they were for Godzilla, the Rotten Tomatoes score is 19% vs 74%. That said, if it makes money Hollywood will probably be happy to ignore the reviews (see Michael Bay's career).

[The Anti-Targ]

8 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Source Code is a good movie for 90% of its length let down by a spectacularly careless ending. I think it's goodwill-y enough, but Warcraft is an entirely different sort of film. It's possible he'll learn from it - I'm certainly hoping Gareth Edwards had when he made a similar (albeit much huger) jump from Monsters to Godzilla and made a very average blockbuster.

That said, what impact this has on Jones' career will have little to do with critical reviews- despite being average, Godzilla made plenty of money, so Edwards got both a sequel and a Star Wars film. That could still happen here.

To a certain degree Jones can't be blamed for how Source Code ended, because he was only the director, not the writer. I don;t remember the ending well enough to say whether the ending was a story fail or a directorial fail, but a Director has to work with the script he's got. It still earned really positive reviews and made money, so unless a movie exec happens to be like den and actually hated Source Code it's an entirely positive thing to have on the CV.

8 hours ago, williamjm said:

It seems the reviews are much more savage for Warcraft than they were for Godzilla, the Rotten Tomatoes score is 19% vs 74%. That said, if it makes money Hollywood will probably be happy to ignore the reviews (see Michael Bay's career).

I think Warcraft will fail at the US box office, so it will be down to the foreign box office, and possibly specifically China to make it break even. The Warcraft fanbase alone isn't enough to make this movie profitable, a probable >$100 million budget saw to that. And that some Warcraft fans don't like the movie is problematic. To get a sequel this move needs to do more than break even, it needs to perform at a Transformers-like level, well maybe not that high of a bar, but it needs to shine at the box office. I really don't see that happening.

And as far as a Transformers comparison goes, the first movie earned 57% on Rotten Tomatoes, so almost fresh with a review average of 5.8/10. This is a stellar critical performance compared to the way Warcraft seems to be heading.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

On May 27, 2016 at 9:35 AM, ambi76 said:

What are the complains you're seeing then, because I barely see a critic that doesn't harp on the GoT & LotR comparison (and yeah, there is no winning that game)? Well, and that one who wanted the movie to be a comedy.

I also see some general "lame fan movie" complains. Okay. (But not really relevant if you are actually a fan). Characters not fleshed out enough. Sure. There is only so much you can put into 123min and if you want a deep story from this movie you'll have a bad time. It's perfectly fine light entertainment though.

The thing bothering me the most was the insanely cheesy ending.

Still not getting the below 4/10 thing except you really want to be pissed off by the movie in the first place.

"Complians"?  Do you mean "complaints"?

[Jasta11]

Man, critics are tearing this movie to pieces and then some. Even more than the usual summer blobkbuster, I mean. I shouldn't be surprised since, well, Blizzard's writing mostly sucks, but I had hoped the people doing the movie would keep the cheesy bits in check. Seems I was wrong. Oh well, maybe I'll still go watch it with a friend after we've had a few drinks.

When even IGN can only give a Warcraft movie 7/10, you know something is up.