Movies adapted from video games are a disreputable genre, and Warcraft isn’t likely to change that. Critics savaged the movie when it opened last Friday, competing to see who could come up with the most withering put-down and who could be first with the laborious punch line “Game over.” Of course, everything is a competition now: the gaming of America, which began with the emergence of team sports in the early 20th century and accelerated with the advent of video games in the 1980s, has reached its logical conclusion in a presidential contest destined to play out as a real-time strategy game. Fox News and MSNBC are indistinguishable from ESPN, focusing on the candidates’ strategy to the exclusion of all else. Already the candidates hunch over their phones, firing off Twitter insults at each other and checking their TV screens for evidence of a direct hit.
Director Duncan Jones understands the importance of characters. His first two features—Moon (2009), about an astronaut losing his grip on reality near the end of a three-year lunar mission, and Source Code (2011), in which a soldier keeps reliving the same eight minutes in order to isolate and prevent a terror attack—branded him as an exemplar of high-concept sci-fi. Yet those movies would never have worked without their strong, willful protagonists, played by first-rate actors (Sam Rockwell in Moon, Jake Gyllenhaal in Source Code). Brought into the Warcraft movie to replace Sam Raimi, Jones came down hard on the script’s flat characterization. “It was the stale fantasy trope of, humans are the good guys, monsters are the bad guys,” he told the New York Times. “It just didn’t capture in my gut what made Warcraft, the idea of heroes being on both sides.”
