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The Warcraft Movie From A Player's Point Of View

WarcraftA little over seven years ago, I got a stray email from someone I hadn't talked to in five years. We had been friends since high school but drifted apart. In the short email she told me of a game she had recently gotten into, World of Warcraft, and that I should buy a copy and join her. I did as I was told, jumped into the world of Azeroth with both feet. I quickly found it to be an amazing, expansive world with a rich history. And where other games like Madden and Arkham Asylum could only hold my interest for a few days or weeks, WoW has kept me playing ever since the day I signed up.

The Warcraft movie is offering to the general public the same thing I received in that email. An invitation to step into a world of Orcs and Human, of warriors and warlocks. A world with a rich history that can be expanded on and explored in subsequent films. It's not a character piece, it's a war story with lots of characters that are thrown together for one situation. And a lot of critics are bashing it for that. But the truth is, making it a character driving piece would've been a disservice to all of the lore that makes the property amazing.

I'm going to compare it to a very popular film… not to say it's as good as or not as good as the other film, but rather to show that some of the components are similar. The film also has War in its name… Star Wars.

I won't go into details about Warcraft, but if you've seen the film then you'll get these comparisons. We didn't know or really care about Owen and Breau, but we felt Luke's pain when we saw it and understood why he decided to go with Ben. We didn't have much time with Ben, but we took the importance of his sacrifice when it happened. And we got little to now background on the villains, but we accepted Darth Vader as evil. When you boil it down, Star Wars introduced us to a world with a rich backstory, introduced us to two sides of a conflict and showed us what happened as a results of one of the battles in the war. And we didn't care what the critics said about the movie, we jumped right into the world of Jedis and Siths… before we ever knew what a Sith was.

That is what Warcraft is, a step into an amazing world that was visually stunning. It's the first look into something so much bigger. And yes, I may be biased being a fan of the game and understanding some of the lore going into it… but I'm not the type of player that knows every character, their family line and every battle they fought. I'm a casual gamer and I'm a casual movie goer and Duncan Jones gave me my money's worth and brought to life on the big screen a world that I've been living in on my computer for seven years.


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Dan WicklineAbout Dan Wickline

Has quietly been working at Bleeding Cool for over three years. He has written comics for Image, Top Cow, Shadowline, Avatar, IDW, Dynamite, Moonstone, Humanoids and Zenescope. He is the author of the Lucius Fogg series of novels and a published photographer.
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