‘Warcraft’ rises above its video-game origins
No need to have ever played a video game to enjoy War
craft, though a healthy affection for swashbuckling action and throwback fantasy probably helps.
Director Duncan Jones’ adventurous adaptation ( out of eee four; rated PG-13; in theaters Friday) of the popular role-playing game doesn’t have the expansive nature or deep mythology — at least not yet — of Peter Jackson’s
The Lord of the Rings series, but Warcraft wins by not trying to be the second coming of a 10-hour cinematic trip through Mordor. Rather, it’s a simpler yet still wholly entertaining tale of magic and larger-than-life soldiers in a battle for survival.
Thanks to the magic wielded by their wicked leader Gul’dan (played through motion capture by Daniel Wu), the world populated by barbarian orcs is dying. As a result, they travel through a interdimensional gate to the human realm of Azeroth to take over.
Young mage Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer) gets a whiff of trouble and warns King Llane (Dominic Cooper) and his military guru Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmel). The armaments are broken out, Lothar scrambles his men — including his son (Burkely Duffield) — and Medivh (Ben Foster), the local wizard guardian, is called in to negate the effects of Gul’dan’s green oozing magic called the Fel.
Swords clang, orcs roar, won- drous creatures take flight, etc. With any other filmmaker at the helm, this might have been as uninteresting and flat as another Dungeons & Dragons movie. But like his iconic father, David Bowie, Jones has a knack for elevating material, as the director did with his man-in-space picture Moon and sci-fi mystery Source Code. Jones infuses Warcraft with themes of tolerance and identity but also a similar sense of fun and wonder as Krull, The
NeverEnding Story and others did in the campy ’80s fantasy boom.
Lothar is an earnest individual, but Fimmel gives him a snarky side that plays well against the inherent clumsiness of Khadgar and the fish-out-of-water nature of Garona (Paula Patton), a half- orc warrior with whom he’s tied in a potential romantic dynamic. However, Jones upends even that cliché in insightful fashion.
The computer-generated landscape of Azeroth is mighty fine, yet it is tough to get your bearings on whether you’re in the city of Swiftwind or the magical city of Dalaran as folks scoot between them frequently on the road to foiling Gul’dan’s treacherous plans. And many of the CGI orcs, while well-crafted, tend to look the same in attacking packs.
A standout in that lineup — and of the movie in general — is Durotan, one of the orc chieftains given life through Toby Kebbell’s motion-capture work. With a heart almost as big as his barrel chest, Durotan is an unlikely hero who rebels against Gul’dan in order to protect his fellow warrior wife (Anna Galvin) and their newborn baby. Kebbell’s performance showcases the nuances of a father gripped by the no-win situation of having no home and his family in constant danger.
With Warcraft, kin is mightier than the sword.