( spoilers )

First Overwatch, and now the Warcraft film. Blizzard is really going ham in 2016.

Let's start with the point: Warcraft was better than I expected similar to Overwatch. This doesn't mean I don't have any problems with the movie, however.

I want to begin by saying I'm impressed with the general presentation of the movie. It's a pretty film to watch. Not just pretty, but they also did a good job of making us, the gamers, feel special by including things we'd appreciate. The little Murloc early on in the movie shouting its iconic gibberish at one of the main characters. The scene where they show a Gryphon landing in the exact same spot the game takes you to in Stormwind when you use a flight point to get there. And they didn't forget to throw in a 2 second scene where Medivh shape-shifts into his signature crow form and flies away to avoid being noticed.

Casting was awesome as well. Travis Fimmel as Anduin was spot on. Ben Foster was perfect for Medivh. Paula Patton nailed that sexy-but-strong balance in Garona. You don't get that feeling of "WTF? Why'd they pick THAT person to play this role!" The action scenes were good as well. Used plenty of familiar spells, such as Teleport, Soul Siphon, Arcane Blast and Ice Barrier. There were two scenes that depicted the Orc's traditional Mak'gora duels. It all came together to get the job done.

However, part of why I was able to enjoy the movie is because I understood who the characters were already and what was happening. Sadly, for people who don't, the movie is probably way too short. The fact is, Warcraft is a story that has a lot going on in it. There's a LOT of important characters from SEVERAL different races with so much detail and simultaneous conflicts to where it just needs to be elaborated upon so people who have no idea what the hell Warcraft is can keep up. The movie is neat but it leaves everyone outside of the gamer world a bit confused and wanting more answers. Not only that, but the beginning of Warcraft is kind of bland anyway. A lot of the characters who are involved in some of the biggest events in Warcraft weren't relevant this early on in the lore. It's a vicious cycle of needing to explain more things, but at the same time not having enough to work with to explain in the first place because of where they are in the timeline.

It's like if they made a live action Naruto movie, but ended it with his battle against Gaara. That's what this movie is. Which, there's kind of no way around it because you needed this foundation to continue with the rest of the story, so it's kind of a situation of having to inevitably bore people with sort of an "introductory movie" ( which did a poor job of introducing things in the first place ) and then being able to get to the more juicy parts of the Warcraft story in the following movies.

Either way, considering who was involved in making the film and the circumstances I just described, I think they did what they could. I mean it's not as awful as the freaking Dragon Ball movie. What was seen in that movie cannot be unseen even 7 years later. I would give it a 2.5 out of 5. It was ALMOST a 3. It's fun to look at and they kept us gamers in mind but I mean, if they're trying to be comparable to films like LotR, they're going to have to do really damn well with Warcraft 2. The film needs to be longer, the story needs to be told better, and the characters need to be memorable for EVERYBODY, not just the people who've played the game. As some other critics pointed out, they kind of just zipped back and forth between main characters and never gave you time to get attached to any of them.

My last point I just wanna throw in here is that, aside from the casting, I feel they dropped the ball on Medivh. A lot of what was going on with him was explained horribly. You go from learning he's the "guardian", to learning he may have tampered with fel magic, to seeing him completely morph into a demon form and bring some boring ass golem to life which does more fighting than Medivh himself just before his climactic defeat at the end of the movie. So basically, unless you play WoW, you don't know:

- Exactly who the hell Medivh is ( outside of the fact that he's "a guardian of Azeroth" )
- Why he's tampering with fel magic or how he came across it in the first place
- Why he built a golem
- How and why he ended up aiding the orcs with the gate

He essentially just walks around as this bad ass wizard dude but you never learn a damn thing about him other than he's a bad ass. This is a good example of what I mean by the characters not being memorable for non-gamers. It also sucks that Garona was the only meaningful female in this movie. They tried to make Draka important but honestly no one cares. The only thing she did in the movie was fart out Thrall ( which, she couldn't even do that right since Guldan had to literally put a soul into poor babby Thrall ) and put Thrall on a babby boat moments before getting impaled with a sword. So it's basically a sausage fest outside of Garona. I'll go ahead and group that under the timeline issue though I guess.