Dear Duncan Jones:
I’m sorry to be writing you under these circumstances; I wish I didn’t have to. We've spoken a number of times, we've met in person, and you seem like a genuinely nice guy. But... Warcraft, man. It’s not good. I mean, it’s not Jupiter Ascending, but still, there’s nothing to it. It’s got blood and guts, but no blood and guts, you know? So I've been thinking about what happened, and I think what happened is this: You made a film to bring a videogame universe to life. You wanted to give people who love that game a movie about their favorite place. But, like many adapters before you, you seem to have forgotten the reason gamers game in the first place. They want to play, not be played with.
Almost three years ago—July 2013—you took the stage in Comic-Con’s Hall H to talk about how excited you were to be making a film adaptation of Blizzard’s MMORPG, World of Warcraft. At the time, you weren’t too far removed from your well-received indie films Moon and Source Code, and said that as a director “you hope that when you get the chance to make films, you really get the chance to create fantasy, and in Warcraft, I actually get to create a world.” Nerd heads exploded. You looked ecstatic.
Unfortunately, Warcraft completely lacks that joy. Granted, orcs and humans fighting over the future of Azeroth isn’t a warm and fuzzy concept, but the result is still lifeless. Every fight feels like a foregone conclusion, every character barely more than an archetype. I went back and looked over my notes from the screening; they start out "this looks real AF," but then just kinda fall off, as in the theater I lost interest and started paying more attention to the stash of granola bars I found in my bag. The cast—Paula Patton as Garona and Ben Foster as Medivh especially—showed a can-do attitude about the whole thing, but maybe that’s just because we could actually see their faces; there’s so much flash happening, it’s almost impossible to see anything. Warcraft is a beautiful, shiny thing. But it feels like that’s all there is.
As for why this happened, a cynic might say “money,” and that might be true—the movie did already make $46 million dollars in one day in China—but I think there’s something more to it than that. Duncan, you love World of Warcraft. You wanted to bring it to the big screen. You wanted to give WoW players a big-screen version of their adoptive homeland, and welcome moviegoers into a world they’d never seen before. And now that motion-capture technology and CGI are capable of making all those wizards and orcs come to life, you could. But could and should are different things. Having seen a good number of your indie brethren move on to blockbuster franchises—Colin Trevorrow, Rian Johnson, Gareth Edwards—you were surely aware of the pitfalls of the adaptation/sequel/reboot game. So why this one?
Make no mistake: your movie is beautiful. No fantastical realm has ever looked so real on a movie screen. Every orc’s thoughtful eye and every flying mount’s feathered wing is perfect down to the last imperceptible pixel. Warcraft manages to skirt the Uncanny Valley with room to spare. Peter Jackson set the bar pretty high for fantasy worlds with the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies, and the goal with Warcraft seems to have been to out-Weta Weta. Thanks to Industrial Light & Magic, it succeeded visually. But on a deeper level, the one that concerns itself with a story, it did not. As much as Jackson’s Hobbit movies felt like overkill, they still had compelling characters and a story. There is little in Warcraft that reaches those heights, and even less that doesn’t feel predictable.
The road to a Good Videogame Adaptation is littered with the corpses of Super Mario Bros. and Tomb Raiders. Nothing is impossible, but making a decent movie out of a videogame might be. As a gamer, you should know the reason why. While a person might like the story in a game, they play it because they become part of it. Warcraft, like the others before it, takes that control away—and while your directorial hands are capable, they're still not ours. With Warcraft we're no longer the players, and it made us hate the game.
