For years, video-game adaptations were almost guaranteed to be disasters: Super Mario Bros., Doom, and Double Dragon all spring painfully to mind. Judging from the trailer, though, the forthcoming Warcraft, adapted from the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft, wants to change things. No more liberties taken with the source material! No more goofy made-up characters or cheesy plots! It’ll be faithful to the game, down to the creature design! And that’s kind of the whole problem with this trailer: It feels like Warcraft has overcorrected, making a perfect, faithful depiction of a video game most of its potential viewers will never have played.
This is probably most glaring in the creature design and art style, which is faithfully adapted from the game. That’d be great if World of Warcraft weren’t a cartoony game in the first place. Seriously, look at this:
That’s Paula Patton, put in adorable little lady tusks and footlong pointed ears. I’m guessing most of the non-gamer audience burst out laughing when they saw Patton’s makeup, and to be honest, most of the cartoony, chunky design of Warcraft, which is great for the game, doesn’t work elsewhere. Fans might gasp at seeing Garona, big as life; most of this movie’s potential audience will think she’s a Gamora knock-off.
Similarly, while the trailer is thankfully light on “lore,” which can bog down any fantasy movie, it still relies on everybody knowing what Warcraft is. And in a way, that’s worse, because nobody stopped to think the challenges a movie like this has in front of an audience. As long as there’s been gaming, there’s been a tendency to overestimate gaming’s cultural impact. Kim Kardashian’s dress-up app has more users that World Of Warcraft, at its peak, could ever dream of. Developer studios will gleefully announce their game made more money than Hollywood in a weekend, but will suddenly talk about anything else when asked how many people actually bought their game.
So to your average moviegoer, this just looks like another Lord of the Rings knock-off. Granted, the plot hinted at in the trailer — about a human and an orc coming together to engineer an armistice, seems interesting to me — but I’m a nerd who’s actually played this game. For people with no emotional investment… Why should they care? While the effects are undeniably impressive, is that really enough to get butts in seats?
We’re getting a whole bunch of faithful video-game adaptations in the next few years. And avoiding Hollywood’s previous sins against gaming could prove to be a smart move, both artistically and financially. We just hope we’re getting more than a version of the game you can’t play.
