This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
If someone had the ambition to interview the subscribers of the World of Warcraft online game, I daresay any one of them — 5.5 million, as of last September — would have come up with a more coherent story than what the Hollywood pros created for the mess that is "Warcraft."
Set in the land of Azeroth, where knights ride griffins and nerdy boys learn magic, this adventure tale imagines a clash between the locals and the invading Orc hordes who are escaping their ravaged home via a green-magic portal. King Llane Wrynn (Dominic Cooper) entrusts his noblest knight, Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmel), and his guardian wizard, Medivh (Ben Foster), to devise a strategy against the Orc armies.
Some of the Orcs, we learn, are good: The half-orc Garona (Paula Patton) earns the King's trust and strikes romantic sparks with Lothar — while the Orc chieftain Durotan (a computer-animated creation performed by Toby Kebbell) plots rebellion against the warlord Gul'dan (performed by Daniel Wu), whose evil magic controls the portal.
Director Duncan Jones ("Moon," "Source Code"), rewriting a screenplay by Charles Leavitt ("In the Heart of the Sea"), aims to be true to the popular multiplayer video game, piling on legions of Orcs, human soldiers and other creatures that strain the computer-graphics imagination and mock the PG-13 rating.
Alas, even with Jones' occasional flashes of visual wonder, the story is a dull hodgepodge of fantasy elements familiar to readers of J.R.R. Tolkien, George R.R. Martin and authors who don't have extraneous middle initials.
'Warcraft'
Opens Friday, June 10, in theaters everywhere; rated PG-13 for extended sequences of intense fantasy violence; 123 minutes.