'Warcraft' aims to level up the video game movie
Populating a fantasy landscape of wizards, warriors and monster wolves was all important to Warcraft director Duncan Jones. Yet just as key to the video-game adaptation is the tragedy and humanity at its core.
Or, as he puts it, “we were trying to make a real movie.”
The film (in theaters Friday) proved to be a three-and-a-half-year passion project. As a fan of Warcraft, a popular franchise of games, novels and other media since 1994, the director's aim was to raise the bar for the video game movie genre but entertain gamers while also creating an inviting experience for everybody else — not unlike what Peter Jackson did with The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring for J.R.R. Tolkien lovers and neophytes.
“My whole career has been based on 'How can I get myself into a position where I can make the stuff that’s in my heart?'” says Jones, the 45-year-old filmmaker of Moon (2009) and Source Code (2011) and son of the late David Bowie.
In Warcraft, relative peace in the kingdom of Azeroth is interrupted by an invading war party of orcs, a brood of tusked barbarians led by the evil Gul’dan (a motion-capture performance by Daniel Wu), who have arrived via an interdimensional gate.
One warrior father on each side has to protect his family in the face of battle. Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmel) commands the human forces, while orc chieftain Durotan (Toby Kebbell) questions his leader’s motives.
Warcraft doesn’t have “a very strict line of goodies and baddies,” says Kebbell, a veteran of motion-capture performance after starring as the simian Koba in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. As an orc “who’s massive and grotesque and brutish, I was still able to play a father and have a gentle, intimate relationship with my wife and be a rounded individual.”
That theme rang true for Paula Patton, who stars as the human-like orc warrior Garona: “You can look at the world we live in and say that no matter what culture or country you come from, we all feel love, pain and anger the same way."
With $70 million banked internationally in the past two weeks, Warcraft has a chance "to break with tradition and end the long-standing streak of mixed box-office results for this most difficult of genres for Hollywood to decode," says comScore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian. It's been "game over" for most adaptations: Only one film — Angelina Jolie's 2001 Lara Croft: Tomb Raider — has broken the $100 million mark domestically, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com.
While deep relationships aren’t needed for storytelling in the Warcraft game world, they’re essential to the movie's success, Jones says.
“Computer games by necessity require huge numbers of big impact moments and characters drawn in broad strokes to work as avatars,” the director says. “There was a looseness to the video game narrative and characters that need detailing.”
So Jones inserted life-and-death situations to grip the hearts of moviegoers while exploring headier stuff, such as the corruptive potential of absolute power.
“Trying to tap into all the high drama and emotional stakes, I’m going to get this audience to care whether they want to or not!” Jones laughs. "These things, even though they’re wrapped in the costume of fantasy, they resonate. Audiences understand them.”