Warcraft Review – 4 Ups And 6 Downs

2. The Tactless, Trope Heavy Script

Warcraft Ending
Universal Pictures

What€™s so disappointing about this being a Duncan Jones film is how much it just wallows in convention. His previous films felt fresh and unreliant on hard-fast genre tropes, but this one just repeats so much that we€™ve seen before.

The dialogue is like the work of a video game script-writer circa 2005 - generic old-timey language mixed with fantasy inflections that the actors clearly don€™t fully understand - and delivers what exposition we do get in such an obvious way. It€™s also incredibly oddly structured, with lots of cheap narrative clichés popping up; something is revealed about a character and the next scene we see them doing that explicit thing.

Of course, some of this is going to stem from those problems in the edit, but that doesn€™t really excuse it at all.

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Contributor
Contributor

Film Editor (2014-2016). Loves The Usual Suspects. Hates Transformers 2. Everything else lies somewhere in the middle. Once met the Chuckle Brothers.