7/13/2023 0 Comments Warcraft orcs and humans viewerFans of the genre, or the games, are more likely to see the points where Jones succeeds in transcending the usual blockbuster fantasy tropes. And at every step along the way, Warcraft is clearly trying to be richer and more sophisticated than the average fantasy blockbuster. He's also finding resonance with his favorite themes, as seen in his previous films, Moon and Source Code: all three of his movies are about people caught up in work they think is critical, until they realize how they're being victimized and lied to by people taking advantage of that work. He's trying for something denser and more realistic than the usual fantasy binaries of pure, simple good and evil. He's trying to tell a story about people driven equally by duty and personal need. That alone is a tall order, but Jones' ambitions reach much higher. And it’s trying to please hardcore fans of the game series without completely confusing or alienating non-players who’ve never spammed knights to take out an orc encampment, and don't even know what that means. It’s trying to set up a potentially enormous film franchise for Universal. It’s trying to find a suitable relaunching point for a story that Blizzard’s video games have been telling in different forms for more than 20 years. As a long-troubled adaptation of an immensely popular video game series, 10 years in development (and in Sam Raimi’s hands before Jones took over in 2013), Warcraft comes to the table with a complicated series of mandates. The films that tend to provoke the strongest reactions are the ones that try to force art and commercial sensibilities to meet square in the middle.ĭuncan Jones’ Warcraft is a perfect example. Some particularly craven cash-grabs leave art almost entirely out of the picture, but those aren’t the most frustrating films, just as the pure-art prestige pictures are rarely the most fascinating ones. Every big studio film represents some kind of compromise between commerce and art.
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