Warcraft: 8 Things It Actually Did Right
4. It Didn't Water Down The Story
One difficulty that video games tend to have when they're being adapted to the big screen is finding a decent story. In the vast majority of cases video games are popular primarily for their game play, and the story is merely an element that ties various sections of game play together. This means either coming up with an original narrative that somehow relates to the game or trying to adapt a story into a structure that suits cinema.
Take the recent animated adaptation of Angry Birds, for example. Consisting of slinging tiny birds at structures that contain green pigs, Angry Birds wrestled to come up with a narrative surrounding this concept. The Warcraft film, however, never felt lacking in story, which is understandable given how one of the things championed about Warcraft is its deep and complex lore.
Though the story itself is, at its core, pretty simple – the orcs are looking for a new home and the humans fear their world is being threatened – the details never feel watered down.
Names are thrown around, allusions are made to locations and past events and in a rare instance a video game movie almost feels like it has too MUCH story. Still, the abundance of references, while initially confusing, is an effective way of world building the fantasy setting.