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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Everyone in this movie was the same age and it made it really hard to tell family relations. Like I guess Medivh has a daughter that is an actress that is 5 years older than him Yeah, goddamn, this poo poo. "Behold the honorable King Llane, a 35-year-old man, and Lothar, his friend who is also 35." In a setting with so many difficult-to-explain settings and characters, it's confounding they cast it this way. Everyone looked like members of the same LARP guild; nobody inhabited their role in a remotely lived-in way and the "society" they were allegedly part of felt totally unreal. A more cross-generational cast would at least have shorthanded some degree of social complexity or hierarchy. Though, I guess tons of young people makes sense given the hyper-gloss look of it. Everything about the aesthetic of this film was fairly revolting to me. The cartoonish hugeness of every prop and the absolute garishness of every color was real unpleasant...not that I'm surprised, because that's certainly consistent with the games. But goddammit. The only thing that "works" is the Orcs. And even then, only like half of them...scenes where they inhabited a real-looking space were great, but then the film immediately cuts to some CG inflatable bouncy castle and loses me. It sucks because there are definite elements of a good movie in there, but they got so lost in the lore and setting. The story of this movie could've been so simple: the Orcs arrive and are a hyperreal source of horror. Azeroth is boring and mundane, and the Horde is this walking nightmare of giant green monster men. But as it stands, *everything* is hyperreal. Every soldier carries some kind of blunderbuss, and there are wizards surrounded by glowing blue poo poo, and their castles float, and there are elves with glowing eyes and giant griffons that fly. The central conflict doesn't even stand out against it. In that sense, its high budget was probably a liability. It *could* try to depict anything, so it did.
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Jun 14, 2016 02:44
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Jones taking the blame for this would be pretty much the worst possible outcome, since there was never really a chance the thing would make money, much less warrant a sequel. Though, I suppose if David Lynch could bounce back from Dune...
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Jun 14, 2016 02:47
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Bimmi posted:Jones taking the blame for this would be pretty much the worst possible outcome, since there was never really a chance the thing would make money, much less warrant a sequel. I think Jones will be fine, though it may be a bit before a studio is willing to give him $150M again. He's garnered a lot of respect with Moon and Source Code. His DP on the other hand...
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Jun 14, 2016 02:53
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Xealot posted:It sucks because there are definite elements of a good movie in there, but they got so lost in the lore and setting. The story of this movie could've been so simple: the Orcs arrive and are a hyperreal source of horror. Azeroth is boring and mundane, and the Horde is this walking nightmare of giant green monster men. These films already exist. They are awful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs1_OyRwwpQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI8eBc8AaJM
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Jun 14, 2016 02:58
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I get that you guys liked his other movies but I don't know how you watch this and think the director isn't responsible for it's failings. Probably not solely responsible but he was definitely not some unfortunate genius trying to polish a turd.
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Jun 14, 2016 03:13
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Well, he did have the poor judgement to take on a Warcraft film in the first place.
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Jun 14, 2016 03:26
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Xealot posted:It sucks because there are definite elements of a good movie in there, but they got so lost in the lore and setting. The story of this movie could've been so simple: the Orcs arrive and are a hyperreal source of horror. Azeroth is boring and mundane, and the Horde is this walking nightmare of giant green monster men. But as it stands, *everything* is hyperreal. Every soldier carries some kind of blunderbuss, and there are wizards surrounded by glowing blue poo poo, and their castles float, and there are elves with glowing eyes and giant griffons that fly. The central conflict doesn't even stand out against it. That's literally what the first Warcraft was. Orcs arrive and they're riding wolves and summoning demons and poo poo and Stormwind guys get stomped into the ground despite fending off the first Orcish expeditionary force. Like, the Stormwind humans didn't even have dwarves or elves. But everything I'm hearing seems to indicate that none of this really happens in the film and it kind of crushes the first two games together.
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Jun 14, 2016 03:41
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^^ Yeah, I played the first two RTS games. And they're great. Though I don't mind the "Orc as noble savage" thing as much as many people do. Probably because I stopped playing before WC3 and it sounds like it got real dumb. ^^Snowglobe of Doom posted:These films already exist. They are awful. Sure. Anything can be terrible or great based on execution. What I mean to say is, the primary novelty of Warcraft's story, as I see it, is that it's like other Lord of the Rings-style fantasy narratives, except the Orcs are actually culturally and morally nuanced in ways not true of Tolkien. The Warcraft movie is strongly interested in this idea, and that's cool. But it's buried under so much other world-building stuff, I found it hard to care about or even follow that aspect. The "kitchen sink"-ness of the movie probably hurts it. If it'd devoted more time and energy to characterization, to characters the audience had any reason to care about, maybe beats like Lothar's son dying or Llane sacrificing himself or Guldan betraying the Orc honor code would've landed. Or maybe it would still have sucked. A definite possibility, I just think Duncan Jones can pull real humanity out of a genre setting, but here he doesn't have a chance to because of the noise. Xealot fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Jun 14, 2016 |
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Jun 14, 2016 03:41
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Milky Moor posted:That's literally what the first Warcraft was. Orcs arrive and they're riding wolves and summoning demons and poo poo and Stormwind guys get stomped into the ground despite fending off the first Orcish expeditionary force. Like, the Stormwind humans didn't even have dwarves or elves. The second game was WAY more "new units" more than more story. Little happened in that game and it just double downed on stuff that happened in the first game. So drenor double died and they double broke the portal and most of the plot was just introducing a ton of new unit types.
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Jun 14, 2016 03:46
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:The second game was WAY more "new units" more than more story. Little happened in that game and it just double downed on stuff that happened in the first game. So drenor double died and they double broke the portal and most of the plot was just introducing a ton of new unit types. The second game updates the backstory a lot by introducing Sargeras and co as corrupters of the Orcs, but the actual game is essentially the same and it makes sense to just cram it all together into one for the movie.
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Jun 14, 2016 03:51
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The new Hollywood system is to hire mercenary directors with a track record of being able to make good character dramas to do large-scale productions. This is partially a financial decision and partially a preventative measure against making a $300-million-dollar boondoggle that gets savaged by the press and superfans and kills your bottom line. The old calculus of "We'll get a guy who's done a lot of large productions" has not proven that reliable. With that in mind I doubt this will matter that much to anyone's career.
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Jun 14, 2016 03:54
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Xealot posted:Or maybe it would still have sucked. A definite possibility, I just think Duncan Jones can pull real humanity out of a genre setting, but here he doesn't have a chance to because of the noise. From what I can tell he actually had a direct influence on a lot of the script changes. When Raimi was helming the project it was based on the original 90s Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans game and was pretty much a "Good humans vs evil orcs" story but when Jones took the reins he decided that the good/evil split should be balanced instead of one sided and the script was rewritten to his spec. I don't actually know how much studio interference went on or what happened in the editing bay so  who knows who's really to blame for the lack of a cohesive narrative, but I'll point out that his previous film Source Code was produced on a $32 million budget and went on to make $147m worldwide so there's some obvious parallels there to Josh Trank's journey towards Fantastic Four.
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Jun 14, 2016 03:58
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:From what I can tell he actually had a direct influence on a lot of the script changes. When Raimi was helming the project it was based on the original 90s Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans game and was pretty much a "Good humans vs evil orcs" story but when Jones took the reins he decided that the good/evil split should be balanced instead of one sided and the script was rewritten to his spec. The war3 retcons have existed longer than the original version at this point, I can't imagine they were ever seriously thinking about making a Warcraft movie that ignored 95% of the story Warcraft has.
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Jun 14, 2016 04:20
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:The new Hollywood system is to hire mercenary directors with a track record of being able to make good character dramas to do large-scale productions. This is partially a financial decision and partially a preventative measure against making a $300-million-dollar boondoggle that gets savaged by the press and superfans and kills your bottom line. The old calculus of "We'll get a guy who's done a lot of large productions" has not proven that reliable. I think the trick here is the difference between directing drama and directing melodrama. If he had gotten the actors to sell it in the same way the ILM artistic directors did for the orcs (giving beats enough room to breathe, getting some variety in that intensity so its not all one-note performances, etc.) then I think it would have had a mythologic feel that would have sold the looney world-building.
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Jun 14, 2016 04:43
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it's a hella small victory, especially as one of them was painted green, but the two main female characters are played by women of color and it passed the Bechdel Test! for real though, the gently caress were they thinkin' casting a young dude as Medivh and making his first scene with him lookin' like shirtless Jesus?
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Jun 14, 2016 08:14
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the escape goat posted:for real though, the gently caress were they thinkin' casting a young dude as Medivh and making his first scene with him lookin' like shirtless Jesus? Basically every human character was miscast, but yeah Medivh was the most aggressively terrible casting choice. I also have no idea what the gently caress Orgrim's storyline was and how it went from "Dude who coups Blackhand and actually leads the Horde to conquer Stormwind" to "Dude who plays second fiddle to Durotan and then proceeds to betray everybody but also everybody is chill with that???"
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Jun 14, 2016 08:46
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You'll just have to wait for the next movie!
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Jun 14, 2016 09:00
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1stGear posted:Basically every human character was miscast, but yeah Medivh was the most aggressively terrible casting choice. The message of Doomhammer is "Hey, just do what you want and nobody will care".
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Jun 14, 2016 09:42
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the escape goat posted:it's a hella small victory, especially as one of them was painted green, but the two main female characters are played by women of color and it passed the Bechdel Test! Lol people still care about that poo poo?
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Jun 14, 2016 10:24
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lol people still care about representation in entertainment? Get a life losers
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Jun 14, 2016 11:12
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Get out of my movies women!!!
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Jun 14, 2016 14:37
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Thinking that not liking a movie because it doesn't pass the Bechdel Test is silly does not make you a MRA.
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Jun 14, 2016 15:49
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GonSmithe posted:Thinking that not liking a movie because it doesn't pass the Bechdel Test is silly does not make you a MRA. The test is a test of movies in general, not a rating system for individual movies. But it's not silly at all to care if movies are some weird lovely "only white men are actual people" garbage like a shocking number of movies still do.
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Jun 14, 2016 16:23
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I'm holding out for the multi page rant about one of the soldiers being black is unrealistic.
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Jun 14, 2016 16:26
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Comrayn posted:I'm holding out for the multi page rant about one of the soldiers being black is unrealistic. the queen was black and gave a dagger to the other black protagonist, garona, in order to protect herself, a dagger which she used to kill the king, a symbol of the white patriarchy. this movie is really about #blacklivesmatter. #killallwhitemen tbh Huzanko fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Jun 14, 2016 |
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Jun 14, 2016 17:01
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Xealot posted:It sucks because there are definite elements of a good movie in there, but they got so lost in the lore and setting. The story of this movie could've been so simple: the Orcs arrive and are a hyperreal source of horror. Azeroth is boring and mundane, and the Horde is this walking nightmare of giant green monster men. But as it stands, *everything* is hyperreal. Every soldier carries some kind of blunderbuss, and there are wizards surrounded by glowing blue poo poo, and their castles float, and there are elves with glowing eyes and giant griffons that fly. The central conflict doesn't even stand out against it. This is without the interdimensional starships piloted by glowing wind chimes who are totally not angels flying around, or the steampunk airships, or the clockwork battle mechs, or... This is a weird setting, mkay.
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Jun 14, 2016 19:20
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Cythereal posted:This is without the interdimensional starships piloted by glowing wind chimes who are totally not angels flying around, or the steampunk airships, or the clockwork battle mechs, or... This is a weird setting, mkay. I must have missed those in the movie. It didn't matter that the games go to over the top poo poo five sequels out it doesn't mean the simple beginnings should also be stupid.
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Jun 14, 2016 19:40
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I saw the movie, played ww1 2 and wow original. I didn't read a single quest text or storyline through, so anything would've been fresh to me.. Because I never paid any attention to the story through, I was looking for game elements in the movie, and there were none that i could recognize. That was a disappointment. The plot they presented just made me root for the orcs. The humans had some magical font that recharged their magic, some magic cube, guns, what did the orcs have? Strength due to a harsh culture? That fel thing just existed in their home, did guldan bring it there or did he merely use what was available to help his race? because brute strength is obviously worthless next to magic. Is it the orcs fault that they get the poo poo magic that makes them crazy and costs souls? So it doesn't bother me that they took souls to even the fight.. Not that it seems to help with human magic just ending the fight everytime, at no cost. Where was the orc terror anyways? Ambushes were the only time they were shown to be powerful, and magic ended those. And what did the humans do with all their advantages? Not protecting their people, they were gonna hold up somewhere safe. Fel magic didn't even compete with human magic, guldan just stood there in that final fight.. Really could of used blimps and towers and ship fights.
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Jun 14, 2016 19:45
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Femur posted:I saw the movie, played ww1 2 and wow original. I didn't read a single quest text or storyline through, so anything would've been fresh to me.. Both lore wise and just thematically fel magic is the end stage malignant form of magic instead of being an actually better and stronger form of magic. It's only shown in the movie solving problems that wouldn't have existed if it hadn't caused the problems to begin with.
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Jun 14, 2016 20:24
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What kind of loving weirdo looks at that scene with the Draenei and goes "yes these orcs sure are sympathetic"
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Jun 14, 2016 21:36
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Well it didn't really explain what the fel was. If it was just some terrible poo poo that existed in their homeland, it seems like their homeland was doom regardless of how often guldan used it, just touching it made you dumb and crazy? Why else did that guardian go crazy? He went there and touched it and and he went crazy slowly, thanks to cost free magical font. So the orcs had dumb warrior customs, did not have magic outside of that guldan guy, did not have technology, not even a bow and arrow. I felt bad for them that they stood no chance against way superior race in all manner. Even that fel magic enhanced orc got killed instantly with with an agility move, so fel strength proved to be worthless even in a fight. Seriously, what chance did the orcs have? Even when the humans feel into that trap in the end, guldan didn't soul steal all the humans, fel magic is complete crap. The humans didn't even unleash all their other races and that magical council or whatever. It was a pathetic beatdown. I don't remember the dranie thing? The only bad thing shown was the wolf guy watching his horde chase villagers for a few minutes.. But its not like the human kings is shown to be distraught about his people, and rescuing them. Near the end when he was being set up by the guardian was the only time.. So it wasn't exactly his heroism. The big battle scenes, magic melted the raiding orc party, magic stopped an orc trap ambush, and finally magic teleported humans to safety. Magic is shown superior in every fight, and orcs had none outside of that fel poo poo, that was inferior in every way. The only reason this wasn't a 5 minute movie was because the guardian was crazy. All the humans in charge were like were is the guardian!? They know how puny strength is against magic.. So i felt bad they bought a knife to a laser fight. If dranie you mean that orc killing the wolf clan thing, traitors deserve it, true in all society. Fel magic was used 2 ways really beyond enhancing brute strength , saving that baby, and opening a huge portal to save the rest of the orcs. Not very evil, if it didn't make you crazy Femur fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Jun 14, 2016 |
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Jun 14, 2016 22:06
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Femur posted:Well it didn't really explain what the fel was. If it was just some terrible poo poo that existed in their homeland, it seems like their homeland was doom regardless of how often guldan used it, just touching it made you dumb and crazy? The draenei were shown briefly at the very beginning, as fuel to open the portal. A draenei mother begs Garona to save her son. Also all of your other points are pretty spot on, this movie is a real mess the more you think about it. They don't explain anything well.
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Jun 14, 2016 22:34
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Femur posted:Well it didn't really explain what the fel was. If it was just some terrible poo poo that existed in their homeland, it seems like their homeland was doom regardless of how often guldan used it, just touching it made you dumb and crazy? It's almost like it turned out guldan was a really bad leader and not a good leader and his plan to use evil murder magic was a bad plan that didn't actually accomplish things except to cause more problems.
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Jun 14, 2016 22:48
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Yeah one of the movies big flaws was all you get on the Orcs background was "Our world is dying" and it doesn't tell you that the reason it's dying is because the Orcs all shacked up with a warlock that siphoned life from the planet for personal power
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Jun 14, 2016 22:57
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Fojar38 posted:Yeah one of the movies big flaws was all you get on the Orcs background was "Our world is dying" and it doesn't tell you that the reason it's dying is because the Orcs all shacked up with a warlock that siphoned life from the planet for personal power They did explain that pretty straightforwardly.
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Jun 14, 2016 23:01
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There was a scene where the Frostwolves discuss that fel is naturally corrupt and use the natural surroundings as a point. All around the orc camp, the plants died, but everywhere else plant life flourished, then they talk about how fel will just have them jump from one planet to another, always invading, rather than having a home. Warcraft has flaws but I think that was explained pretty well.
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Jun 14, 2016 23:01
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does the movie even show peons mining gold or chopping down trees? what the gently caress.
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Jun 14, 2016 23:12
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Groovelord Neato posted:does the movie even show peons mining gold or chopping down trees? what the gently caress. No one said "zug zug" or "stop poking me," zero stars.
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Jun 14, 2016 23:25
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Xealot posted:No one said "zug zug" or "stop poking me," zero stars. Them not that kind of orc!
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Jun 14, 2016 23:31
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Xealot posted:No one said "zug zug" or "stop poking me," zero stars. They say zug zug.
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Jun 14, 2016 23:34
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