Durotan's fierce mate Draka (Anna Galvin) delivers an adorable orc baby early on, and Lothar's son, Callan (Burkely Duffield), is determined to impress his father on the battlefield.His counterpart on the human side is Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmel of TV's "Vikings"), a knight devoted to serving his benevolent king and queen (Dominic Cooper and Ruth Negga). Orc soldier Durotan (Toby Kebbell, like all orc players, working in performance capture) questions the brutal ways of his clansmen - led by warchief Blackhand (Clancy Brown) and power-hungry warlock Gul'dan (Daniel Wu) - and believes a compromise without bloodshed is possible.The "Warcraft" games-which radically have declined in popularity from a high of 12 million regular users in 2010 to a recent low of close to 5 million (so low the company behind it no longer releases subscriber counts to the public) - were never meant to have the narrative depth of "The Lord of the Rings," or even "Game of Thrones." But the film cribs freely from both of those sources anyway, as well as "Star Wars," "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes," "Avatar" and numerous other recent blockbusters. That's despite the noble effort of director Duncan Jones, who helmed the lower-budget sci-fi wonders "Moon" and "Source Code" and labors mightily here to craft a solid emotional foundation in his script with Charles Leavitt.Otherwise the studio could be looking at one of the biggest duds of the summer. If so, Universal will have to hope they storm the box office early and often. It's a take-it-or-leave-it approach likely to have most audience members opting for the latter, though devotees of the immersive role-playing source material may have an entirely different experience. With little concern for all those already perplexed at the mention of orcs and mages, "Warcraft" plunges headfirst into a fantasy realm teeming with mythical creatures, magical spells and exotically named characters and locations.It shouldn't take a mage to foresee that this pricey and preposterous adaptation of an online gaming phenomenon was preordained for artistic mediocrity.In the meantime, these answers are better than none. Hopefully, whatever future Netflix has envisioned for this franchise will take a bit more time to explore the world more. The answers that the short video provides are really useful if you watched the film - it provides some context for the world building that was frustratingly glossed over as Will Smith and Joel Edgerton raced from gunfight to gunfight. It doesn’t all make sense in explaining the fantastical world with the more modern version we saw. Magic was apparently banned in the 1800s, and it shoehorns in things like the Stone Henge to the Taj Mahal, to the first atomic weapons in 1945. The clip goes on to talk about the creation of magical wands, the rise of the Dark Lord hinted at in the film, and the efforts to defeat him.īut this backstory is also plagued with some of the same flaws that accompanied the film: incongruities with an alternate world and the familiar history of our own. But in 2600 BCE, an Egyptian pharaoh used magic to build the pyramids, setting off a sort of magical arms race that resulted in even more powerful magicians. In short, magic was once prevalent throughout the world - ancient villages each had a wizard, and used them for good. This quasi-documentary helps answer a bunch of questions that the film left behind.
The movie follows a human police officer and his orc partner after they discover a magic wand, and fight to escape with their lives from various criminal gangs and cults that want to get their hands on it. To help fill in those gaps, Netflix released a short video that highlights all of the history of the world that would have made the story a bit more comprehensible.īright might not have been great film, but it did introduce viewers to an intriguing fantasy world it just didn’t explain any of it. The action film is set in a modern fantasy world where elves, humans, and orcs live alongside one another, but it only alluded to the larger world that drives much of the story. Netflix recently began streaming its big blockbuster Bright, and it hasn’t been entirely well received by critics.