The movie is character-driven every step of the way. That’s why, even if the world created by Jones and his talented design collaborators, both old-school physical and cutting-edge digital, isn’t seamlessly believable so much as staggeringly crafted, it casts a spell.

The film takes a long time to build dramatic momentum and gets interrupted by what seem like unnecessary plot points; some of them, perhaps, geared towards potential sequels.

Director Duncan Jones, a self-professed Warcraft fan, has clearly put a lot of love and care into fleshing out a story, but it’s questionable whether it was ever really merited. There’s a terminal flimsiness, as if this virtually-derived world hasn’t quite assumed three dimensions.

The pristine setting never meshes with Jones’s efforts to give emotional reality to his army of characters, who cannot escape their tropes: leader, hero, warrior woman, mystic.

So good at making the most outlandish elements of his first two films seem completely credible, Jones can’t find a way to get this cartoony spectacle to soar. His heartfelt approach to the material only underlines the silliness.

Imagine “Battlefield Earth” without the verve and you get this sludgy, tedious fantasy adventure, a fun-starved dud that’s not even unintentionally hilarious.