First reviews for 'Warcraft' movie (MC: 31/100)

[binary solo]

Boutros said:

binary solo said:

OK, but it has 127 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Clearly MC uses a much smaller pool of reviewers, so I'll ignore that and just go with at least 30 reviews on RT.

And aside from you being a particular fan of final fantasy, what makes you think the rest of the world (and in particular movie critics) will like Kingsglaive? In terms of critical reception in western markets Final Fantasy movies have not done well, they've not done badly like Ratchet and Clank or Warcraft, but the benchmark is Angry Birds right now and that's got a high RT score for a video game movie.

OT Warcraft looks to be heading towards Ratchet and Clank levels on Rotten Tomatoes. I was considering going to see this in the theatre if it managed to be above 30% on RT. But below 20%, not a chance. I'm not even going to see R&C, which is a game franchise I have actually played and like.

I just really don't think Kingsglaive will score lower than Spirits Within (44%). So it puts it above Angry Birds. And the trailers have been awesome so far. It will be praised for it's technical prowess if nothing else. It worked for Beowulf.

I hope you're right. But obviously technical prowess doesn't get you good review scores, because technical prowess is the one thing for which Warcraft has been getting generally good praise. As a complete guess, because I have no clue about Kingsglaive, I suspect it might suffer from some of what Warcraft is suffering with critics: a fundamental lack of establishment of the world, the characters and the context which makes the movie largely only accessible to franchise fans who have a lot of knowledge going in.

I'm loving the headline voice cast for the movie, I just hope they signed on because they like what they read in the script and they're not just doing it for a payday. There's little need for Lena Headey to do it for a payday since she's hopefully making out like a bandit on Game of Thrones. Though she was probably a cheap hire when they first greenlit GoT, so maybe she's not making bank directly from GoT, but rather from the star power she's earned from GoT, in which case Kingsglaive could just be a decent payday for standing in front of a microphone (it looks like they aren't going to be mo-capping either of the 3 headline actors as they are credited with voice only).

I wish you well, but I remain sceptical and cynical about the movie world's ability to turn out good video game movies.

For these adaptations to work it needs a certain genius to head up the adaptation who is a great movie maker but also someone who actually appreciates the video game as an artform worthy of respect. If you don't respect the source material as an artform then you are already off to a bad start. That's why I had hope for TLOU as Sam Raimi seemed to respect the artistry of that game at least. But it seems like their commitment to making something worthy is running up against the difficulty of making a great adaptation to the movie form as things seem to have fallen into that dreaded development hell. Perhaps Sam Raimi has the respect but doesn't have the genius needed. Though Druckmann is cited as the screenwriter, and while he's a great talent at writing a video game story, perhaps the somewhat different skill fo writing a movie script is outside of his creative wheelhouse.

This thing is a genuine tough nut to crack. There is excellent source material out there in the video game world with fantastic characters, deep and complex stories, amazingly realised worlds and lore, but no one has made a genuine movie masterpiece from it.

If Christopher Reeve's Superman was the first really good comic book movie (boxoffice mojo lists 142 comic book based movies and the earliest one is Superman in 1978), perhaps a really good video game movie will come 50 years after video games became a genuine story-telling medium. If one was to peg the start of the modern serialised comic book to the 1920s then 1978's Superman is pretty much 50 years after comic books started to get going. Though comic series really began in the late 1800s apparently.

So are we looking at 2030 or 2040 before someone figures out how to crack that nut? I'll probably be dead by then, so I hope not.