Warcraft is on the leading edge of a new wave of video-game adaptations. Whether they put video games squarely in the cultural foreground, or become as forgotten as Double Dragon, is an open question. But one thing’s for sure, they’re not going to shy away from putting the war front and center.
Just like the last trailer, the plot takes something of a back seat to showing orcs punching orcs, humans stabbing orcs, humans blasting orcs, and orcs burning villages just so they can get one in the “win” column. We guess they need a reason to stab and blast orcs. Sorry, villagers.
Beyond that, it appears the level of detail in depicting the game up on the screen has, if anything, been upped substantially. That said, we’d really like to see what makes this movie stand out from the hordes of fantasy movies that arrived in the wake of Lord of the Rings raking in a pile of gold. It feels a bit, so far, like the audience is just supposed to know Warcraft, or will just roll with the idea that it’s a movie about orc-fights without caring about the source material. And they might well be right! After all, most audiences showing up to watch Marvel or DC movies couldn’t care less about the crossovers and hero backstories — they want to see the punching. We’ll find out soon enough: Warcraft arrives on June 10.
(Via Facebook)