The point at which we should have known that the decade-in-the-making Warcraft film (released in the UK today) wasn't going to work out was when its title was extended to Warcraft: The Beginning. Everything misguided about this production can be read into the two words after that colon. The producers' hubris in taking a future franchise as a fait accompli. This film's unsatisfying status as a set-up, rather than a main event. An admission to fans of World of Warcraft that this wouldn't quite be their Azeroth: the film turns the clock back a generation to tell, roughly, the story of the 1994 strategy game Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, and is more focused, but much reduced in scope from WOW's vivid tableau of squabbling races.
A couple of years ago, Jon Hamblin visited the set of the Warcraft movie for Eurogamer and interviewed director Duncan Jones and members of the cast and production staff. Then we had to sit on it for 18 months, because film PR is really weird.
Above all, that subtitle suggests that the film's director and co-writer Duncan Jones - the talented director of sci-fi nuggets Moon and Source Code - has set out to begin an ascent of the mountain of lore created by Blizzard's head writer Chris Metzen and his team over the course of 20 years, and that this task has overwhelmed what should have been his primary goal: giving life to the anarchic pop-fantasy universe still loved and inhabited by millions of players worldwide. In World of Warcraft, it's the place that matters, not the story - something perhaps even Blizzard itself doesn't fully understand.
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