Warcraft

When growing up, I wasn't into the comic book or video game phase, so my knowledge of these arenas is sparse at best. So when I went to see "Warcraft", I had no Idea that, even though it's based on a video game series, that there would be more than one film to carry on this obvious franchise. I'll have to do my homework more thoroughly in the future, because this truly became bogged down a bit as the story played out.

Humans and orcs clash in this feature-film adaptation of the popular video-game series. After realizing that their home is becoming uninhabitable, a race of orcs travel to the peaceful realm of Azeroth. There, they encounter the realm's human denizens, who fight against the invaders. In time, an orc warrior, Durotan (Tony Kebbell) and orc female Garona (Paula Patton) forge an alliance with a group of humans including Anduin (Travis Fimmel), Llane Wrynn (Dominic Cooper)--king of Azeroth, and two guardians, Medivh (Ben Foster) and Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer) in order to overthrow the orc's corrupt leader, Gul'dan (Daniel Wu) and bring peace once again to the land.

Others to round out the cast are Robert Kazinsky as Orgrim, Clancy Brown as Blackhand, Ruth Negga as Lady Taria, Anna Galvin as Draka, Callum Keith Rennie as Moroes, Burkely Duffield as Callan, Ryan Robbins as Karos and Dean Redman as Varis.

This was directed with gritty intensity by Duncan Jones ("Moon" '09, "Source Code" '11) plus a short. Even though this filmmaker doesn't have an elaborate amount of experience, the work he's done stands on its own, especially "Moon", which was basically a sole performance by Sam Rockwell which takes talented directing for any actor to pull that off. The adrenaline and explosiveness of this was staged and paced well. It was written by Jones and Charles Leavitt based on a story and characters by Chris Metzen. This certainly was a well structured script--Leavitt alone has a tremendous amount of experience, but about half way through, there was a bit of slowness and a couple of places where it looked as though they didn't know what to do. Otherwise once the storyline got past the half mark, this story increasingly improved. And how many films of this genre have we seen? A ton! Between "The Immortals" and the "Lord of the Rings " trilogy and many others, these types of films are getting a bit tiresome. One nice aspect was that of the chemistry between Fimmel's Anduin and Kebbell's Durotan. The camaraderie between the two was refreshing. Of course, the visual effects predominantly designed by ILM (Industrial, Light & Magic) were absolutely seamless which made for a killer large screen presence.

Certainly if you're a lover of this particular genre, you'll be in medieval heaven. It is a truly popcorn flick that is so fitting of the summer movie season all in a nifty IMAX and 3D format to give one that grandiose feel.

Out of 4 Stars: 2.5                                    Rated: PG-13                                    123mins.