Orcs invade a planet of humans from their own dyeing planet through a magical gate. There is a human vs orcs battle, and of course the typical double agents and unlikely love story. The film leads to a sequel.

In this story the Orcs are more like Klingons with a code of honor than the Orcs we witnessed in LOTR. There is a lot of magic, with a fear of "The Fel" a magic which sucks the life out of a living thing. (Guess why the Orcs keep relocating.) The film is based on a video game, and unlike "Final Fantasy VII" movie, it is watchable. The CGI and humans blended in perfectly. It was incredible to watch.

The game/film builds upon what we loved about LOTR, Harry Potter and previous RPGs. It combines it into an epic tale.

On the downside, I didn't like the actors. I think names like Liam Neeson and Zoe Salada would have brought much more to the screen. I liked our hero mage Callan, I just didn't think Burkely Duffield was right for the role. The dialogue needed some zip. And since this is a film and no longer a game, the love story/drama needed better development.

Disclaimer: I have briefly played WOW when my sister left her computer on while she had to talk to a bill collector on the phone. Certainly having WOW is worth going late on a mortgage payment. I managed to get her level 70 mage killed in five minutes. How is that even possible? I enjoyed the feature and look forward to a more promising sequel.

Guide: No swearing sex or nudity. Killing without gore and blood splatter. One sex talk scene about wanting to "lie with me" and he would get hurt.

Having never played the War of Warcraft video games, I knew nothing about the gaming world. The film adaptation boasts great special effects which concerns Orcs escaping their dying world and invade the world of Azeroth. The human inhabitants of Azeroth try to stop them.

The trouble is that the Lord of the Rings made this film more exciting and involving. I could not really get into this film despite the interesting opening and immersive world created by director Duncan Jones. The film just gets bogged down making it boring and derivative. At least Ben Foster stands out, many of the other actors just come across as humdrum even Paula Patton in what should had been an interesting role as the green-skinned Garona Halforcen.

WARCRAFT is yet another movie adaptation of a popular video game. I used to play the original WARCRAFT back in the late 1990s when it was much different and more straightforward when compared to the sprawling WORLD OF WARCRAFT MMORPG available today. Sadly, the film turns out to be merely lukewarm, a rehash of fantasy tropes and cliches that inevitably harks back to LORD OF THE RINGS as well as AVATAR and about a dozen other influences. I'm no fan of the motion capture technology used in cinema today and it's rather ineffective here; the orcs themselves look like nothing more than slightly awkward CGI creations and a ton of possibly decent performances from the likes of Daniel Wu et al are wasted within them. The human plot is simplistic in the extreme and although the likes of Travis Fimmel and Ben Foster do their best, they can in actuality do very little with the cliches they're given. On the plus side, some of the sprawling action scenes are visually impressive, particularly at the climax, and the non-orc CGI effects are frankly great; I just wish we had more substance to go with the style.