The movie "Warcraf"t is in a genre that is known to often to very badly. This genre is bringing video games into the realm of cinema. This does not include movies that use video games as a resource, like Wreck-It Ralph. Rather I mean to talk about the movies whose plot and characters and based off an already existing story in a video game. A few of these movies include the Mortal Kombat movies and the Silent Hill Movies. The second Mortal Kombat movie got a 3 percent on RottenTomatoes.com and a 3.7/10 on Imdb.com and the first Silent Hill movie got a 29 percent on RottenTomatoes.com and a 6.6 on Imdb.com. Seeing both of these for myself, these ratings honestly seem rather generous. Even if I actually love the Silent Hill movies and franchise, I can understand the dislike for the movies. A more recent movie that has done this would be the Ratchet and Clank movie which got a 16 percent on RottenTomatoes.com and a 6/10 on Imdb.com. "Warcraft" falls into these genres of movies, but honestly, I had higher hopes for "Warcraft." The base game has rich lore and an enveloping story and it was created by Blizzard, one of the most influential and powerful companies in gaming. Their first endeavor at creating a movie has not gone the best, but has a good explanation.

Unlike the Mortal Kombat movies, "Warcraft" wants to actually try and be a good movie. The movie tries to recreate this enormous world in the span of only 123 minutes. They do give an honest shot at this by explaining certain aspects of the world that are important to the world itself. People who have played World of Warcraft or Warcraft the games understand what some of these aspects of the world mean, which appeals to this audience of die hard fans. These moments have the inverse effect where the people who are new to this world will not understand what is happening. These people will end up somewhat confused at the rushed narrative and constant change of scenery into a new place which has not been established in the movie before. This is where lies one of the most challenging parts of translating a video game to a movie; who is your target audience? While the people making this movie obviously want to attract die hard fans of the series, it is equally as important to appeal to a new audience in this new form of media. The problem with this is if you appeal to the die hard fans, the people who have not played the games before will end up confused by the story and may seem left out of some key elements in the story. If you appeal to the new audiences, then the die hard fans will feel betrayed as the movie will end up being a watered down version of the story that they love. Their is some way to make this balance perfect, "Warcraft" has come closer to this than any other movie from a video game, but they have not quite nailed it yet.

Another important flaw of the movie is the screenplay. The actors are good for the most part and the animation style is extremely loyal to the game series which it comes from. The main problem of the movie itself becomes evident when you see which parts of the movie are most interesting. It becomes difficult to describes this part of my review because of avoiding spoilers, but the best parts of the movie are the ones already established by the game. The key parts of this story are what is most interesting in the movie, the characters, the main conflict of the story, and the moments that are canon to the game are unsurprisingly the best parts of this film. The game has built and interesting story, which is why Blizzard thought to make it a movie presumably. The worst parts of the movie come from when they have to actually film the scenes, how they are written and the actual parts of the movie which have not happened in the game. For example, One character is sad for the death of another character which was close to him. After this happens we see him drunk in a tavern and then says to another character, “This is saddest I have ever been in my life”. My exact phrasing may be off by a bit, but not very much. Another example comes from when one character tells his back story. It seemingly comes out of nowhere and despite being completely new and exciting information about places and people that we have not seen or heard of before, it only gets a short twenty second explanation. The pacing of the film is bad and writing thinks that it can sacrificed being nuanced for more explanation of the world. The problem with this philosophy is that it is no excuse for sacrificing quality writing, and even if it was, it would not have worked because so much of the world has still not been developed.

Making video games into movies has always been a bit of a mess. There was already an example this year being Ratchet & Clank and "Warcraft" fell into the same hole. While better than most movies made from video games I have seen, it still holds the same fatal flaws of all the others. Which audience do you appeal to? Is there a way to appeal to both audiences enough? What aspects of the game can and can't we show? All of these questions have not quite been answered yet, but I am hopeful that they can be figured out before the new Assassin's Creed movie, and if not the next "Warcraft" movie.