WARCRAFT will have “heroes on all sides”

In life, there are always certainties. Death, taxes and video game movies being downright terrible. On the rare occasion that such a film is good, like say Silent Hill, there are a dozen Double Dragon movies with Mark Dacascos to tilt the Yin balance of those adaptations firmly into the Yang of box office bombs. But there’s always some vague hope that the next adaptation will actually be not kak.

That’s where WarCraft comes in. It’s the pride and joy of Blizzard, the franchise that they used to make a name for themselves. It’s also a series of games with an absolutely immense lore, a history that spans decades and isn;t just a simple case of good versus evil. While it’s downright impossible to condense twenty years of the massive conflict between Humans, Orcs, Elves and cover art from an Iron Maiden tour, the themes present in those tales are something else.

For the film itself, both Orc and Human factions will be in the spotlight, because everyone is the hero of their own story. “What Blizzard has always done well is draw from things that we feel like we know very well, whether J.R.R. Tolkein, Marvel Comics or Star Wars, and synthesize those and turn them into something new,” WarCraft director Duncan Jones said at PAX East 2016 panel via Polygon.

Warcraft will introduce the idea of heroes on all sides. It’s two different perspectives on a conflict and a war that’s unavoidable.

In the lore of the game, it was a dark portal between the Orc homeland of Draenor that brought them to the Human-dominated world of Azeroth. Draenor itself is described as a land of “magma and metal, stone and steam” in the game lore. But the Orcs who inhabit, aren’t exactly monsters. “One of the first shots is a lingering close-up of Durotan as he watches his wife sleep,” Ogrim actor Robert Kazinsky said as he referred to Draka, warrior-mate of Durotan.

Those 10 seconds is all it takes for the audience to melt into his eyes and say, ‘Yes, I get who this character is,’ and not see him as a monster. There’s an inherent joy in this film because so many of us are gamers. We’re telling the story in the way that it’s meant to be told, but there still are a lot of fun little moments.

Jones also added that the language of the Orcs will include plenty of verbal terms from the World of WarCraft glossary, while the rest of their language has been put together by a linguistics expert from Game of Thrones. “We kept coming to experts to ask for help and finding out they were big-time Warcraft players,” Jones said.

WarCraft is finally out on June 10. Remember to take a horde with you as you charge into the cinema.

 

Last Updated: April 26, 2016