'Warcraft: The Beginning' review: Just noise and fury without power or soul

Film: Warcraft: The Beginning
Director: Duncan Jones
Cast: Travis Fimmel, Dominic Cooper, Ben Foster, Paula Patton, Toby Kebbell, Ruth Negga

What it's about

This is a story that begins at the end of it all. You already know how this story (dare I say, franchise?) ends. War is nigh and that's something you see coming. While the land of the Orcs is dying, their leader, a dark mage called Gul'dan (Daniel Wu) shows them a way out to another world that they can inhabit and make their own. Not everybody is happy about it, but they answer the clarion call and make their way to the land of the humans. 

Meanwhile, Anduin Lothar (Fimmel) commander of the forces of Azeroth and brother-in-law to the king, Llane Wrynn (Cooper), is away visiting the forgeries of the dwarves. When he gets news of one of his garrisons being attacked, he returns home to find a former Guardian trainee called Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer), who insists on inspecting the victims. He finds something amiss and alerts Lothar, who in turns takes him to Llane, who gives him orders to summon the Guardian, a mage of sorts, called Medivh (Foster), to help them take on the monsters they come to know as Orcs. After one skirmish, they take prisoners, one of whom is a half-breed called Garona (Patton), who agrees to help them fight the Orcs, who kept her in chains. As the Orcs ravage across the seven kingdoms, Llane, Anduin and Khadgar seek to stop them.

One of the Orc chieftains, Durotan (Kebbell) is against Gul'dan and his plans of opening a portal between the Orc world and ours, bringing hordes of Orcs to ours and wants to help. Suffice it to say it doesn't end well.

The tagline in the title is a dead giveaway. There will be a sequel.

What's hot

Behind all that VFX, SFX, CGI and what-have-you, is a video game-turned-movie that wants your attention. And it has it. It's easy to be bamboozled by all that medieval monsters-versus-us mayhem. You have to admit that the Orcs look fearsome to take on in combat. You have a cast that is on familiar turf: Fimmel as a warrior without fear and a thirst for battle (as Ragnar from the TV show Vikings), Foster as a man consumed by dark power (as Lance Armstrong from The Program), Cooper as a king with questionable intentions (Mehmed from Dracula Untold), Patton as a double agent, as a warrior and a love interest to the hero (Jane Carter from MI: Ghost Protocol) and Ruth Negga as a catalyst in taking the story forward (Raina from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Tulip from The Preacher). Duncan Jones is a director we've come to like thanks to his debut film and a couple of his previous outings. But the love ends there.

What's not

You have a beloved video game. Surely, it's franchise potential. There's so much that can be done with that. There are countless examples to give where cinematic adaptations have turned out to be better than the source and even more so, when they haven't. Sadly, this one leans a little toward the latter. And it needn't have. The film is filled with tropes and subplots that go nowhere. There's a certain air of predictability in the second half and you're kinda ahead of the curve, inevitably boring you to death with the detail on screen. There are several dramatic moments that are meant to get you invested in the story, but they are squandered. Think noise and fury, but without the power and soul to go with it.

What to do

Watch it once. It deserves that at least. Who knows, you might have a different opinion of how it should have ended...

Rating: ***