Review: "Warcraft"

The record for movie adaptations of video games is just atrocious… and it’s not getting any better with the release of “Warcraft.” Fantasy movies don’t fare so well either, so it’s got the double whammy effect.

“Warcraft” has been in development for literally 10 years, when the World of Warcraft online game was just reaching its peak, with millions of people playing characters from a broad range of fantastical races and abilities. There are also some precursor strategy games, novels, collectible figures, replica weapons, and other offshoots of a multi-billion-dollar empire.

(And I know of which I speak. In the years B.K. – before kids – I was an 80 paladin/80 warlock/80 death knight/68 priest/59 rogue on the Kul Tiras realm of WoW.)

It’s not an overstatement to say that Warcraft is the first video game to become a cultural phenomenon. The movie, a $160 million extravaganza heavy on top-drawer CGI animation, became almost inevitable.

I wish it weren’t.

The movie has a slapdash, chaotic feel, as if the filmmakers were trying to stitch together footage shot during two or three different productions. There are continuity errors all over the place – one warrior is broken out of prison, given his armor back, and in the very next scene his armor is gone and he’s barefoot for some reason. Another major figure is revealed to be corrupted by dark magic… but when and how was he corrupted?

There’s missing backstory and motivations all over the place. We watch characters do things without understanding why.

Director Duncan Jones, a promising filmmaker who made the excellent “Moon” a few years ago, co-wrote the screenplay with Charles Leavitt, and I can only guess they were shackled by restrictions from Blizzard, the company behind Warcraft. I would posit they were given a checklist of story elements and characters and ordered to fit it all together somehow.

The story is set in the early days of the Warcraft mythology, when the bestial orcs first crossed over from their dying world into that of the humans, setting off battle. There are also quick nods to a few other races on the “Alliance” side of the game, notably elves and dwarves, but the Horde is just orcs. (Thankfully no pandas, at least!)

The orcs are a wonder to behold, painted with wondrous detail by the animators. They’re huge, seven feet tall and thick as oaks, with green skin and protruding tusks, and a vaguely American Indian style of adornment. A few of the nastier ones even have… other protrusions.

Toby Kebbell plays (through voice and motion-capture performance) the orc hero Durotan, a noble savage who fears for the plight of his people, including a newly born son. Their leader, Gul’dan (Daniel Wu), is a mighty wizard wielding a terrible green magic called Fel, which he uses to open a portal to the human world of Azeroth. But it requires a sacrifice of lives, not to mention poisoning the very land.

On the human side is Lothar (Travis Fimmel), commander of the forces of King Llane (Dominic Cooper), who’s called upon to resist the orcish invaders. He’s an odd hero; he seems more peckish than resolute.

Ben Foster plays Medivh, the stern magical guardian of the realm, who mostly broods in his lonesome soaring tower, occasionally dipping into a pool of blue goo to revive his powers. Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer) is the classic exposition character, a wayward wizard who turns up whenever the plot needs explaining or moving along.

Somewhere in the middle is Garona (Paula Patton, in heavy green body paint), a half-breed orc who’s captured by Lothar and recruited to their cause. The two start exchanging jungle fever-type stares, though Garona helpfully warns him that he would be injured if he tried to lie with her.

Question: if this is the first time the orcs have crossed over into this world, how did a human breed with one of them years ago to create Garona? If you’re asking these sorts of questions, you’re thinking too hard to enjoy this movie.

“Warcraft” is a great-looking flick that should have been a lot more fun, and a lot less silly, than it is.

Video review: "Source Code"

"Source Code" has one of those plots that you shouldn't spend too much time thinking about. It's a high-tech house of cards, with a science fiction backdrop that hasn't quite crossed all it's t's or dotted its i's.

There's time travel, sorta, and "Matrix"-like control of the human mind by nefarious forces. At the center, though, is a touching human story about a man trying to make sense of extraordinary circumstances.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens, a helicopter pilot deployed in Afghanistan. He wakes aboard a speeding train, with a smiling woman (Michelle Monaghan) sitting across from him and talking to him like she knows him. He soon discovers that his consciousness has been projected into that of a man who's already dead -- because terrorists have blown up this train, killing everyone aboard.

Colter must repeat this scenario over and over until he discovers the identity of the bomber. In between his "missions," he finds himself in a strange metal pod, where a female commander (Vera Farmiga) whispers urgent instructions.

Even though the metaphysics of the story don't stand up to scrutiny, director Duncan Jones and screenwriter Ben Ripley still manage to engage us with a sympathetic protagonist and the mystery of his plight.

Information on video extras was still a little sketchy at press time. According to preliminary reports, it will include a feature-length commentary by Jones and Gyllenhaal, interviews, trivia and experts talking about the science of time travel. I didn't get a review copy in time, so I can't say if these features are on both the DVD and Blu-ray versions, or just one.

Movie: 3 stars (out of four)
Extras: I (Incomplete)

Review: "Source Code"

Most science fiction thrillers get the "hardware" part of the movie right -- the technology, the fantastical shifting realities -- and skimp on the human stuff.

"Source Code" is the exact opposite: A flick that engages us with its protagonist and his plight, but the technical part of the story never really seems to add up. After the lights came on, I was left scratching my head trying to figure out the metaphysics and quantum mechanics of it all.

Still, I was caught up in the tale of Jake Gyllenhaal as a soldier on a mission to stop a speeding train loaded with a bomb. In the end, the whys and wherefores became less important to the cinematic experience than the urgency of this time-traveler's duty.

Now, see, I already misspoke. Technically, Colter Stevens is not traveling through time. You'll have to bear with me here, since I can't reveal too much about this movie without compromising its secrets.

Colter wakes up on a commuter train, a sleek modern double-decker hurtling toward Chicago. There's a pretty, friendly girl named Christina (Michelle Monaghan) sitting across from him who acts like she knows him. He goes into the lavatory and sees another man's face staring at him. He's just starting to make sense of it all when a fiery explosion engulfs everything.

Colter wakes up in a dark, dank metal prison, like a Mercury astronaut capsule sunk to the bottom of the ocean. A woman's voice, reassuring but commanding, appears on a speaker asking him to recount what just happened.

Next thing he knows, Colter is back on the train, waking up back where he started. The scenario seems to be playing out exactly the same way it did before ... or is it?

Colter, a helicopter pilot on tour in Afghanistan, soon learns what's going on: He's a recruit in a top-secret new military experiment in "time reassignment." It seems the human brain has a sort of short-term memory track, about eight minutes long, that scientists can access even after death. They also have the ability to project one's consciousness into a similar person's mind and control their actions.

To wit: Colter is sent into the head of a mild-mannered school teacher who must find the bomber from among the hundreds of people aboard the train. Strangely, Goodwin, the officer guiding him in his missions (the capable Vera Farmiga) instructs him not to worry about defusing the bomb, but locating who set it.
Is this an alternate reality? A time loop? A "Matrix"-like facsimile meant to dissemble?

Furthermore, how can Colter keep repeating those eight minutes over and over again, doing something different every time, a la "Groundhog Day," without ever being able to stop the bomb from going off?

(One hint is the code name of the operation, Beleaguered Castle, a form of solitaire in which the player tries to build the cards into foundations, but most games end in failure after just a few moves.)

Director Duncan Jones (who made the wonderful and little-seen "Moon" a couple years back) and rookie screenwriter Ben Ripley ably keep the audience misdirected, making the mechanics of what's happening seem less important than the exigency of it.

So beyond the obvious concern of finding the terrorist, we're constantly asking questions: What exactly is the teacher's relationship with Christina? Why does Goodwin seem a little sad behind the sternness? What are Colter's handlers not telling him?

With "Source Code," the audience may not always understand what's going on, but we care about the outcome.

3 stars out of four

Video review: "Moon"

Snooty cinephiles like to proclaim themselves indifferent to box office grosses, but I admit I pay pretty close attention to them. The reasoning is simple: Movies I like, I want to do well, so studios will have an incentive to make more like them.

"Moon," a tiny independent sci-fi film, made something like $5 million in theaters, which was probably less than the soda-and-snacks budget for "Avatar." Here's hoping "Moon" does well on video, because Hollywood needs more clever, imaginative movies like this one from first-time director Duncan Jones.

Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, the solitary worker living aboard a lunar base responsible for collecting energy from moon rocks that powers much of Earth. His only companion is Gerty, a one-eyed robot (splendidly voiced by Kevin Spacey) very much in the tradition of Hal from "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Nearing the end of his three-year contract, Sam is anxious to get back planetside to his family. But after an accident, he wakes up to find there are now two Sams aboard the station.

Are they clones of each other? Hallucinations of a dying mind? Split personality a la "Fight Club"?

Jones and screenwriter Nathan Parker shrewdly play with the audiences' expectations to keep us constantly, and grippingly, guessing.

Extras are the same for both Blu-ray and DVD versions. They encompass a pretty wide scope of features, although they aren't the most compelling stuff I've seen.

Jones contributes to two separate commentary tracks; one paired with producer Stuart Fenegan, and the other teamed up with the cinematographer and designers. Both tend to be a lot of rambling shot-by-shot descriptions, without much depth or context.

There's a 16-minute making-of documentary, and an 11-minute featurette on the film's low-budget special effects, including the challenges of getting two Sam Rockwells to interact -- and even fight -- onscreen.

There is also over 30 minutes of Q&A with Jones, Rockwell and others at Sundance Film Festival and at Space Center Houston.


Movie: 3.5 stars
Extras: 3 stars

Review: "Moon"

"Moon" is fully aware of the tradition of movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey" where people venture out into space and go totally off their gourd. The existential angst-in-space thing has been done well, and been done poorly (see "Solaris" ... or rather, don't). With "Moon," director Duncan Jones and screenwriter Nathan Parker take us to familiar territory, and yet make it seem fresh and vibrant by playing against our expectations.

Sam Rockwell, a character actor who tackles leading-man roles in smaller films like this, plays Sam Bell. He's an astronaut in the near future who's living on the moon, collecting energy from the lunar rocks that is used to power nearly the entire Earth.

It's a one-man gig, and needless to say Sam is crushingly lonely as he nears the end of his three-year hitch. He's looking forward to getting back to his wife and the daughter he's never met. Because of persistent satellite problems, he can only communicate with them through prerecorded videos.

Sam's only company aboard the space station is Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), a robot caretaker very much in the tradition of HAL from "2001." Gerty moves around the base via system of track embedded in the ceiling, has a single camera eye and emotes via a screen that displays smiley (or not) faces.

There really isn't that much work to do other than occasionally driving out to the collectors to pick up a canister of condensed gas, which are returned to Earth via rocket probes. So Sam bides his time exercising, tending to his plants and working on a tiny model city.

One day on a routine trip, Sam is distracted and crashes his moon truck into the collector. He wakes up back at the base, with Gerty telling him he was injured in the accident. Gerty tries to lock him up in the base, but Sam manages to talk his way out and makes it back to the crash site, where he finds an injured astronaut who looks just like him.

This is merely the beginning of the story, but it's impossible for me to say more without ruining the film.

If you're like me, I thought I had the entire movie figured out at this point. Jones and Parker know what the audience is thinking, though, and use it to their advantage, dropping hints and possibilities.

For awhile, the two Sams steer clear of each other, and we wonder about them. Are they two sides of the same personality? Is one a clone of the other? Hallucinations of a dying Sam, still stuck out on the barren moonscape?

The answer is teased out, and when it arrives it lands with the impact of a giant asteroid. Rockwell plays the two Sams as similar yet distinctly different, like twin brothers raised in separate circumstances. The "old" Sam is peevish and sarcastic, while "new" Sam is more of a hothead.

Gerty's role in the scheme of things is somewhat in limbo. He was programmed by the corporation that owns the base, but seems to have a genuine desire to help Sam in any way he can.

"Moon" is a hard movie to review, since to tell you how wonderful it is I have to give everything away, which I will not do. But here's this: Now that the Oscars have expanded the roster of Best Picture nominees to 10, hopefully it will allow outstanding smaller films like this to make the list.

3.5 stars