Warcraft - My Mustard

I wasn't exactly dying to watch this movie, because I've quit anything and everything Warcraft years ago, I've got a lot of sad family history thanks to Warcraft and I never gave a shit about Warcraft lore, especially when it came to WoW. I wanted World of Warcraft to be about me and my friends, our characters and their adventures, but the game was always about some powerful male hero or villain that we as the players would always just play second fiddle to. And frankly, the lore was never very interesting or original to me.

With all that in mind, I still had a lot of fun with these games over the years. I did play all three RTS games and I have lots of happy (and many not so happy) memories of my time on WoW with friends and family. So I went to see the Warcraft movie and found it entirely watchable. It was far from the best movie of all times, but I liked it.
Part of the reason I enjoyed Warcraft is probably expectation. I'm old enough to have watched Masters of the Universe in my childhood. You know, the one based on a cartoon show and that massive series of action figures everyone loved back then? And I'm saying "based on", when the stupid thing wasn't even set in fucking Eternia, the planet where all things He-Man used to happen. And instead of He-Man's bumbling sidekick Orko we got whatever the fuck this is:

Seamus' scrotum.

And don't get me started on this shit:

Siiiiiigh...

The most tolerable "thing you love turned into a movie" that I can remember from my childhood was the original Ninja Turtles movie. It wasn't great and featured the lamest villain showdown "battle" of all times, but it was still relatively faithful to the cartoon show. Of course 20 years later Michael Bay couldn't leave it at that and had to shit all over it, so...

GAH!

The point I'm making here is that whenever they go and turn some beloved video game or cartoon show into a movie, the end result fucking sucks, looks like shit and usually has next to nothing in common with its source material, because the people in charge don't understand, respect or care about it. At all.

Not. One. Bit.

And then there's Warcraft. I didn't care much for yet another "origin" story, especially since the entire plot of Orcs and Humans can be summarized in three paragraphs on wowhead.com. Of course it still made the most sense to start right at the beginning, because not everyone is familiar with how it all began and if you want to fart out tons upon tons of sequels the way everyone does these days, it's usually a good idea to start all the way back at the stone age.

And the one thing that becomes immediately apparent about Warcraft, from all the trailers, from the very first second you're starting to watch, is how it absolutely looks like fucking Warcraft. You may love or hate what they've done with the rest of the film, but you cannot possibly deny that it absolutely captures the aesthetic of Azeroth. And in an industry, which turned Yoshi into a fucking animatronic dinosaur, this is a pretty big deal.

When they show Stormwind in the movie, you know you're in fucking Stormwind. You see Gul'dan and you immediately recognize him as freakin' Gul'dan! You see (and hear!) a murloc in the movie and you know it's a god damn murloc and not the director's fucking interpretation of a Murloc. And if you think this isn't a big deal, let me remind you...

"Bowser"

To me, this movie was a 2 hour nostalgia trip to Azeroth. Did I watch it through rose-tinted glasses? Fuck yeah, that's the whole fucking point of basing a film on shit you love! And yes, the story was as lame as it was 20 years ago, most of the fights looked worse than they do in the video game and I'd much rather see more elves and dwarves and characters who remind me of friends and guild mates. You know, all the stuff that makes people read Dark Legacy Comics. But this is the first film based on a video game, which actually gives a fuck about the game. And I can totally appreciate two hours of, "I know where this is!", "I've done that!" and "I've totally been there!"

Sure, some of the special effects looked like this was some early 80s fantasy flick, but that didn't bother me at all, because this is Warcraft. It's cartoony and candy-coloured. I hope the fight scenes will look a little less shit in the next one, because you can bet your ass I'm gonna watch the next one. "The Beginning" had its flaws, but to me it felt like the promise of something better, something more awesome. Now all we have to do is fast forward to where (warning: 20 year old spoiler) Lothar gets squished and we can move on to more interesting stuff like Arthas. I hope it's not gonna take them three more movies to finally get there.

And in all honesty, I think Warcraft is in good hands with Duncan Jones. The guy is incredibly cool, clever and I get the feeling that he knows what he's doing. Check out the awkward interview with him and Adam Rosser, who goes out of his way to get some sort of reaction from Duncan Jones, if you haven't seen it already:

What a guy! XD