The given essay will review the movie Warcraft by outlining its pros and cons. Warcraft is an adventure fantasy film set in the fictional universe of Warcraft, presented in the eponymous series of computer games and books. The developers of the Blizzard Entertainment series first announced the creation of the film in 2006 as a project in collaboration with the Legendary Pictures studio. The shooting took place from January to May 2014, and the rental was organized by Universal Pictures (Vejvoda). The film is directed by Duncan Jones, who co-authored with Charles Leavitt and wrote the script based on the plot of Chris Metzen.
It is important to note that the given movie demonstrated the latest achievements in computer-generated imaging (CGI). The main characters in Warcraft are members of two races, which are orcs and humans (Goldfarb). The human faction was played by actors without any modifications, besides the traditional medieval costumes. However, the main outstanding feature of the film was manifested in the fact that orc characters were created by motion capture of actors and further animation enhancements. It is highly common for movies to have primary or secondary characters, which are created by CGI, alongside real actors.
In addition, a number of animated movies use only computer-generated imaging, for example, in animated cartoons. However, the given film attempted to show the entire race of CGI orcs as the key characters with real human actors. Another significant feature is the fact that close-up shots of facial expressions and emotions of computer-generated orcs were highly realistic. The production team had done an outstanding job in making these characters believable.
The main pitfall of Warcraft is that it was not able to compress its storyline, which is based on the game, into a movie format. Many characters were poorly introduced, and the key conflict’s roots were not fully explained.
It is important to note that the problem was that the lore of the Warcraft universe could only be fully described in long narration styles, such as TV shows. However, the CGI quality can drop substantially due to an increase of timescale when computer-generated characters need to be present in the scenes, and rise in costs of creating such detailed and believable images. According to a review aggregation website, Warcraft possesses an outstanding animation, but it does not have any cinematic value (“Warcraft.”). This means that the given movie should not be produced because it cannot be transitioned into a movie format due to the lack of key features of films.
It was certainly a highly overconfident and daring attempt to create a film based on a popular game, which is mainly interesting and comprehensible for the established fanbase. The movie either needed to shorten the selected plot segment from the game lore or completely adjust it into a movie format by dismissing certain characters and events. If Warcraft‘s main objective was to present top-notch computer-generated imaging, it should have focused on showing only the race of orcs and focus the plot on them only.
However, the film tried to possess a multitude of objectives, such as adhering to the original game storyline, pleasing the established fanbase, and compressing a highly long and detailed plot into a short movie format. All these factors lead to the inevitability of failure because the movie was intended to be at least a trilogy.
Works Cited
Goldfarb, Andrew. “Warcraft Movie Will Include Iconic Game Characters, Locations.” IGN. 2013. Web.
Vejvoda, Jim. “Warcraft Movie Rescheduled to Avoid Star Wars: Episode VII.” IGN. 2013. Web.
“Warcraft.” Rotten Tomatoes. Web.