“Warcraft” is the latest failure among Hollywood’s attempt to adapt video games

It seems to be impossible to make a successful video game adaptation. What I mean about “successful” is “critically” successful, since the majority of these films may do well financially, but not well with critics. They don’t give it any good praise about the film and it has become a tradition to just expect failure from video game adaptations. Are critics just being too harsh with this genre or are they in the right? At least for this one?
Well, let’s start with Warcraft. Directed by Duncan Jones, it stars two factions in conflict with each other, Humans vs Orcs. To keep in mind, this film is based on Blizzard Entertainment’s first Warcraft game, “Warcraft: Orcs & Humans”, not the MMO “World of Warcraft” that casual viewers whether gamer (non-fan of Warcraft series) and non-gamer would most likely know. Fans of this series would understand this film a lot more than anyone else. In this movie stars Toby Kebbell playing the Orc “Durotan” who is the leader of his clan and searching for a new world for his people while he and the rest follow the shaman “Gul’ dan” played by Daniel Wu who has his own goals on destroying the new world by literally sucking the life out of it. As the humans of Azeroth now have to fight this new faction to protect their world by allying with a half-human and half-orc Garona played by Paula Patton and Durotan who wants to stop Gul’dan from destroying the world of the humans since it was his magic that destroyed the orc world.
 
With this premise, one would think it would be great to add on some good character development, but for the humans, they don’t seem to engage like the Orcs. In fact, the Orcs are the better characters, Durotan, Gul’dan and Orgrim are more engaging enough for the viewer to care about more. Not much with the humans forced romance, Travis Fimmel’s Anduin weird watery eyes as it seemed that’s the only thing he knows how to do, even with a serious scene he makes that face with his eyes. Since he does that so much that it kills the scene it trying to make.
Another issue the film haves that it tries to put in so much of the lore of the series that anybody who is not aware of it feels like homework to have to learn about it just to understand it instead of expanding one’s knowledge it. But at least the score and visual effect are wonderful and as I said about this film, I do hope it does well because I want to see more of this world. But I don’t know if casual viewers want to come back to the World of Warcraft (Pun intended).