The first trailer for director Duncan Jones’ film adaptation of Blizzard’s Warcraft series has come – and it looks exactly as bizarre as a Warcraft movie probably should.
For most of the last decade, someone has been trying to bring Blizzard’s epic-length fantasy series Warcraft to the silver screen.
The last time it got close, it was under the eye of famed director Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead, Spider-Man 2) with a script by Saving Private Ryan writer Robert Rodat back in 2009 – a project that fell apart due to creative differences between Raimi and Blizzard.
Sometime between then and now, a little movie called Moon came out – an independent sci-fi thriller that took the indie film world by storm and put its director, Duncan Jones, on everybody’s watch list. In subsequent interviews, it became quickly apparent that Jones was a big gamer, which means of course someone asked him about the pitiful state of video game movies – to which Jones had an interesting answer; “I really believe World of Warcraft could be the launch of computer games as good films.”
Fast forward to today, and we have the first trailer for Duncan Jones’ epic scale film adaptation of Warcraft, backed by a huge budget and a release date smack in the middle of blockbuster movie season – June 2016. And frankly?
This is the nerdiest thing I have ever seen and I love it.
Travis Fimmel plays Sir Anduin Lothar, a Human knight of the Alliance and co-protagonist with exiled Orc chieftain Durotan (Toby Kebbell), who is guiding his clan into Azeroth to avoid the wrath of the Orcish Shadow Council (whose leader Gul’dan is played by Daniel Wu). With elements of the Alliance threatening war on the Orcs, it is up to Lothar, Durotan, and half-human half-Orc woman Garona (Paula Patton) to bring the Orcs and Humans together to stop the end of Azeroth.
That sounds like the kind of thing you would have to really love Warcraft to write (in addition to game characters Lothar and Gul’dan, Magus Medivh and Orgrim Doomhammer also play major roles), and the entire trailer looks like a labor of love. Duncan Jones has crafted images that appear ripped from Blizzard’s games, with cities and armors and character designs that match the nearly cartoonish aesthetic of Warcraft perfectly. The scope looks massive and the focus is even between Human and Orc, and it looks as properly insane as a Warcraft film should.
For some, they would be put off by a trailer this strange. Me? I can’t believe this movie got made, and I couldn’t be happier.
Duncan Jones’ Warcraft will be released in June 2016.
