Warcraft is the 2016 fantasy film directed by Duncan Jones, based on Blizzard's enormously popular video game series and starring Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Toby Kebbell, Dominic Cooper, and Ben Foster. It follows the orc Horde invading the human world of Azeroth through a magic portal, with heroes on both sides caught in the conflict. With one of the richest fantasy universes in gaming as source material and a substantial budget behind it, this should have been a fun, brain-off spectacle at the very least. Instead, I failed to enjoy a single minute of it.

And I tried. I want that on record. I attempted to switch my brain off and simply let the spectacle wash over me — it didn't work. I tried to focus purely on the special effects and admire the craft — and every single time I got close to being pulled in, some moment would arrive where one CGI element interacted with another and the whole thing looked so unconvincing and weightless that it ejected me right back out of the experience. It became a pattern: build a little goodwill, then immediately squander it.

Let's talk about the supposedly epic beats, because they fumble with remarkable consistency. Durotan, the noble orc chieftain trying to free his people from the corrupt warlock Gul'dan, challenges him to Mak'gora — an honourable duel to the death. It's framed as a heroic moment. And then Gul'dan simply cheats, draining the life out of Durotan with fel magic. There's no last stand, no memorable final act of defiance — he's drained and gone. For a character the film invested so much time building, it's an astonishingly hollow payoff.

Then there's Durotan's wife, Draka, who places their infant son in a basket and sends him down a river before being found and killed — a beat lifted so transparently from the story of Moses that it tips into unintentional comedy. Float the chosen child downstream, have him found and raised elsewhere, set up his grand destiny to free his people later. Subtlety is not on this film's agenda.

The ending, meanwhile, reeks of a confidence the film never earned. King Llane has the half-orc Garona kill him, a move clearly designed to set up future political and romantic threads, including an implied eventual arc with Travis Fimmel's Lothar. Except there was no sequel, because the film was critically savaged. The genuinely maddening part is that it was not a financial failure — it grossed $439 million worldwide, buoyed by enormous success overseas, meaning it made far more money than a film this poor had any right to.