directed by Duncan Jones
written by Jones and Charles Leavitt
I played the strategy game Warcraft II for a few months after I had graduated from college.It was engaging, and I welcomed the distraction from the rigors of law school, but beyond that I never truly felt invested in this world or its characters, and by the time it basically exploded as a worldwide online gaming phenomenon spawning expansion sets, sequels and spinoffs, I had long moved on to other things.
My lack of personal investment in the game notwithstanding, I found myself with some time to kill and had some interest in watching the film adaptation. For one thing, I had enjoyed the work of director Duncan Jones such as Moon and Source Code, and, having enjoyed the game to an extent back when I played it nearly twenty years ago, I was genuinely curious. I like to think, however, that I had kept expectations reasonably in check, especially given how little I thought of the trailers.
Apparently, my expectations weren't quite low enough.
The film begins with a voice-over narration explaining that humans and orcs have been enemies since time out of mind, then proceeds to show the story of how this came to be. The orc world, Draenor, is dying, and all of the tribes of orcs follow the sorcerer Gul'dan (Daniel Wu) who, using the life force of various prisoners and a dark magic known as the Fel, conjures up a portal to another world, the world of Azeroth, populated by humans, elves and dwarves. There are only enough prisoners to send through a small war party, but the plan is to round up enough prisoners to bring all the orc race through. While the orcs favor this plan, one chieftan, Durotan (Toby Kebbell) has his misgivings, as he recalls how the Fel has destroyed their world, and fears the same thing is happening here on Azeroth.
In the meantime, the orcs' widespread plunder and abduction catch the attention of the humans, elves and other races in Azeroth. King Llane (Dominic Cooper) must decide how best to protect his realm, with the help of his greatest warrior Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmel), a young mage named Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer) and Azeroth's appointed guardian, the powerful sorcerer Medivh (Ben Foster). They may even have a little help from a half-breed orc named Garona (Paula Patton), but Gul'dan, his lieutenant Blackhand (Clancy Brown), the might of the Orc Horde, and the Fel may be too much for even the champions of Azeroth to handle.
Growing up, I used to watch quite a few movies on television which were cheaper, obvious knockoffs of better, more expensive, and more successful films. These films were made without even a token attempt by the filmmakers to approximate the quality of the films they were ripping off. When we finally got cable television I watched quite a few of them, and years later I finally learned that they actually had a name: they are called mockbusters. Sitting through this film I was reminded of those.
My first problem was with the acting, or more specifically, the fact that all of the actors apparently came to work and, presumably at the behest of director Duncan Jones, began reciting their lines in their native accents, with one exception. I can imagine and to an extent understand why Jones might be peeved by the time-worn movie trope that in any English-language fantasy film or period piece, even if the characters aren't actually supposed to be speaking English, they all have English accents. It's convenient and lazy, and spares the filmmakers the effort of having to figure out ancient linguistic nuance or invent new speech patterns and tics for imaginary worlds. Also, to paraphrase Neil Patrick Harris, everything sounds better with an English accent.
James Gunn apparently came up with a different solution to this when he made the blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy: have everyone speak in an American accent, which explains why the Scotswoman Karen Gillan spoke with a distinctly American accent (though English actor Peter Serafinowicz was the lone actor who broke ranks).
Jones' approach feels like he basically told the actors to speak in whatever accent made them comfortable, and the results alternate between hilarious and cringe-inducing. Cooper speaks in his native English accent, Foster speaks in his native American accent, as does Schnetzer (on whose "acting" I will have quite a bit to say shortly), but for some reason, Fimmel, rather than speak in his native Australian accent or put on an English accent similar to Cooper's, dusts off the proto-Scandinavian accent he puts on when playing Ragnar Lothbrok in the Vikings television series. On top of that, Lothar has a son named Callum played by Canadian actor Burkley Duffield, who, despite having been raised solely by his father with the weird Viking accent, has a distinctly North American accent as well. I really don't know what kind of effect Jones was going for with this absurd hodgepodge, but it sure as hell didn't help his storytelling in any way. The Orcs, with the exception of Patton's half-orc (and Shrek cosplayer) Garona, all speak with British accents, but their voices were so heavily filtered they might as well have all been played by one person. And for all of the effort that went into rendering them, they were never able to convince me that they were anything more than video game characters. Think of Ang Lee's Hulk with braided long hair, a loin cloth and big teeth and multiply that several times over, and that's the general appearance of the Horde.
Going back to Schnetzer, of the many things I despised about the film, his performance was hands-down the worst; it was what inspired the title of this review. He comes across as an American student immersed in a role-playing game with his school buddies. There was nothing urgent or convincing about his performance, and the problems go well beyond his accent. He could not have been more out of place had he been talking like Michael Pena in "Ant-Man," and because for some reason he vaguely resembles him, at some points during the movie I actually found myself envisioning the character speaking in Pena's voice. Ben Foster likewise speaks with an American accent but manages to imbue his performance with some level of credibility. It occurred to me that perhaps Schnetzer's Khadgar was written as the avatar for all the Warcraft nerds in the audience.
Apart from the acting, I had serious issues with the script, both in terms of story and dialogue. There's something distinctly depressing about being able to foresee a "twist" in the story the moment the character involved in the twist actually shows his face, but what's even more depressing is reading about how Jones rewrote the script wanting to remove the narrative cliche of humans being good and orcs being bad, and then seeing a number of other story tropes, like revenge, interspecies romance and other time worn story devices play out on the screen. The movie trotted out one cliche after another.
Finally, while I could see the considerable effort that Industrial Light and Magic's animators invested into creating the Orc Horde and the movie's other visual effects like the gryphons and the fantastical cityscapes, none of them was able to transcend their obviously synthetic origins in the way that, say, the Lord of the Rings movies were. Virtually every effects-laden shot made me feel that I was watching a computer game "cut scene" rather than a feature length motion picture. This was down to the fact that none of the performances was particularly compelling, or at least compelling enough to get me to suspend my disbelief that these fantastical creatures or this fantastical world could exist. This has to have been ILM's lowest moment since "The Scorpion King" though to be fair to them, the movie was let down more by the humans acting onscreen than anything to do with the visual effects.
On a positive note, Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi came up with a pretty decent if slightly generic music score.
I really should have waited for this movie to come out on cable television; then at least I could turn it off without thinking of the money I had spent watching it.
3.5/10
