by Brendan Foley
Duncan Jones’s Warcraft is one of the most bizarre and daring blockbusters in many years, a high fantasy adventure that makes no apologies for embracing the wackiest and strangest trends of fantasy. And yet even as the film delights in the genre, it subverts it in canny ways that give this goofy movie involving orcs and wizards and orc wizards a punishing sadness and moral ambiguity that stands apart from the pack of Hollywood product.
Like most of you I’m sure, I walked into the theater with much of the negative buzz floating around in my head. Warcraft currently sits at 26% on Rotten Tomatoes, a score usually reserved for those assaultively terrible affronts to human dignity that don’t always, but often do, feature one or more Happy Madison alums. Given my own lack of awareness of anything to do with the Warcraft video games, I was mostly just hoping to catch glimmers of the filmmaker who wowed us with Moon and Source Code shining through the gears of the studio filmmaking factory.
So imagine my surprise when I walked out of the IMAX theater two hours later floating on the good vibrations from the film, head now abuzz with thoughts of Azeroth and hopes for future returns to that realm.
There is no disputing that Warcraft is a mess, so let’s address the biggest problems right at the top. The most glaring and baffling misstep is the human characters, most of whom seem at a loss as to what tone they are supposed to play. Actors are either swallowed alive by the costumes and design (no one moreso than poor Paula Patton) or never quite get their mouths around the reams of expository dialogue that Jones’ script (which he co-wrote with Charles Leavitt) has them churn through. Only Ben Foster (who underplays like a pro, rendering his grand sorcerer Medivh into a hollowed out rock star) and Dominic Cooper (who just has the exact right twinkle in his eye as he sallies forth in ludicrous armor) found the right way in to the world Jones and his army of tech and crew built.
More subtle is the film’s wonky structure. There are essentially three core locations (Stormwind, the human city; the Orc camp; and Medivh’s wizard tower) and characters are constantly shuttling back and forth from one place to another. It makes the film feel like an extended second act, with characters crisscrossing many physical miles but not making up any narrative momentum. There were three or four different points where it seemed that the movie was starting to wrap up, only for there to be long chunks of film still to go. Not every fantasy movie needs to be wrapped around some sort of quest or mystery, but Jones never finds an engine for his story that will create propulsive energy.
But even recognizing that, Warcraft still proved largely delightful. As sputtering as the narrative often was, the sheer glee with which the film threw out new fantasy concepts and mythology proved infectious. Viewers and critics have complained about feeling lost, but the density of the world is part of the point. Jones pointedly leaves out any kind of opening scroll or explanatory prologue, preferring to throw you into the deep end of Azeroth. He expects you to keep up as the film pushes further and further into matters of arcane magic and Orc tribalism, the film almost never pausing for breath as it adds more and more pieces. Yes, this can be exhausting, but I found it exhilarating in the same way I found a movie like Jupiter Ascending exhilarating: these films are punch-drunk on their own existence, packing in more ideas and story than a dozen other films.
I can one-hundred percent understand why people reject a movie like that. It does not surprise me that folks are rejecting Warcraft (just like it didn’t surprise me that folks rejected Jupiter Ascending). This is a movie that opens with a spiky Orc wizard sucking lifeforce out of blue elf-people to open a green-fire bridge through space so an army can cross into a fantasy kingdom, and the film gives this all of ten seconds of explanation before barreling right on through to the next bunch of lunacy.
But one invective that I’ve seen hurled at the film is that it is ‘derivative’, which feels like a colossal shortchanging of the film; a refusal to engage with Warcraft on its own terms. You can see the influence of Tolkien (just as you can with all modern epic fantasy) but to my mind Jones is using that familiarity in a very canny way, commenting on the genre from within and generating an emotional and thematic richness that other films have not drawn on.
There is quite pointedly no Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker, no safe, vanilla lead character that we can anchor onto as a point of view figure. Everyone we meet in this film has an agency and an agenda, conceptions and misconceptions that blind them and shape their decision-making process. Instead of a somewhat blank vessel who moves through the world and has things happen around them (like a Harry or a Frodo), each of Jones’ protagonists (human and nonhuman alike) are active, making choices and taking major action from the start.
But the real ace up Jones’ sleeve are the Orcs. Incredible feats of design and digital effects, the Orcs in Warcraft turn the film into a referendum on the entire high fantasy genre. There’s always been something vaguely discomforting about the politics of Middle Earth, where all orcs and goblins are perverted, hellacious beasts to be slaughtered in the hundreds and thousands with no second thought. As more and more stories took plays from Tolkien’s books, that same racial make-up, where the pretty human people wage glorious war against the ugly outcasts. Just look at something like our beloved Game of Thrones: for all the energy it put into subverting and twisting and breaking conventions, the end game of the story is clearly going to be humans rallying together to slay the hideous White Walkers.
By making his Orcs refugees from a dying world, and by depicting the efforts of some within that race to stop war and save the world, Jones turns his film into a classic tragedy, a slow-motion disaster picture as we watch misunderstandings, prejudice, and just bad fucking luck speed people towards needless conflict. Our protagonists thrash against the turning wheels of the machine of war, but the wheels keep turning.
The final act of Warcraft becomes a willful perversion of fantasy staples, giving us the sorts of scenes we expect and undercutting them at every turn. (GENERAL SPOILERS AHEAD) When we get the classic moment of opposing races vowing to set aside their differences to combat a threat, it’s not rousing but sickening, as it means that the heroes who we saw sacrifice themselves to agonizing death in the name of peace died for nothing. Jones is taking a shape you are familiar with and twisting it into a new dimension to reveal new facets, the definition of what you want from an interesting director engaging with a genre.
I expect future viewers will be much more positive on the film than this initial wave. There are layers and layers to dig into, both in terms of the mythos of Azeroth and the personal investments of Jones (the depiction of the fel magic as a corrosive and degenerative sickness, and the film’s preoccupation with paternity and paternal figures, all take on much richer meaning if you know what Jones was going through during production) that cult audiences will assuredly delight in. And more than that, somewhere there’s some kid sitting down with this movie who will have their understanding of fantasy realigned by Warcraft. Warcraft is not a great film, but it’s the kind of good film that just might inspire a generation of stories that follow its lead and deliver on that promise.