I know that it wasn’t to everybody’s liking, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t really enjoy Warcraft. I loved how the long-developed video game adaptation didn’t try to soften the mythology’s more out there concepts for mainstream appeal, but just ran with it (very similar to some classic 1980’s fantasy flicks). And not to mention the absolutely jaw-dropping, groundbreaking CG visuals that brought to life, and gave such emotional character to the film’s orcs.
However, for all the things I loved about the movie, there’s no denying that it had problems. The most glaring being a scattershot pace to the film’s opening half, as it just rapidly jumped from scene to scene, in a madcap dash to establish this alien world and characters, but in the process not allowing this very same world and characters the time they needed to breathe and really engage the audience on anything more than just a visceral level.
This rushed pace was of course a result of writer/director Duncan Jones needing to setup all this story so quickly. Some fans had thought that maybe there would be a more fluent version – similar to Batman v Superman‘s Ultimate Edition – that gave the movie the time to develop character arcs better. But speaking to Thrillist, Jones revealed that due to the complexity of the film’s visuals – a process that kept the film in production for three years – the movie you’ve seen in the cinema is the only that will ever exist.
“A lot of people ask me, ‘When is the director’s cut coming out?’ There will never be a director’s cut. With a film like this, where there are so many visual effects, every concession that you make you lose those shots. They cease to exist because the effects work never gets done. Some of it’s not even at that stage. You go through a writing stage right up to the deadline of shooting the thing. [You lose] ideas in the writing process. Then sets change for whatever reason and notes come in. You’re changing things around a three-and-a-half year process. You get these little changes which are constantly course correcting you. So there is no possibility of ever being a director’s cut. It’s purely in my head.”
Well, damn. That’s a pity. At least with all that rushed world-building out of the way now, a sequel could be paced much better. And thanks to the folks over in China, a sequel is now almost guaranteed to happen. But as a sequel would not be able to take a step back technically, would Jones be up for another grueling years-long development process for a sequel?
“If there were an opportunity for us to make another film in the Warcraft universe, I really feel like we did the hard work in the first movie as far as setting the table. I would love to capitalize on three-and-a-half years of hard work and be able to have some fun in that world now that I’ve done the hard work. [So] who knows? Maybe I’m just being a masochist.”
C’mon, Jones. Be a masochist. The world needs more movies where beefy green creatures uses horses as projectiles against armoured knights.
Warcraft will be released on VOD on September 13, and on Blu-ray & DVD on September 27.
Last Updated: August 31, 2016
