A key question surrounding Warcraft, the new $160 million adaptation of the Blizzard gaming franchise, is why the warrior orcs in the movie look so shoddy and strange.
Duncan Jones, director son of David Bowie, has painstakingly re-created the Warcraft world of Azeroth using cutting-edge CGI effects . The movie’s actors Dominic Cooper, Paula Patton and Ben Foster are unrecognizable, buried underneath copious amounts of makeup.
— Durotan (@War_Durotan_) May 28, 2016
Warcraft was clearly a labor of love for Jones—he spent four years on the film and had to cope with the death of his iconic musician father during its post-production.
The film’s actors were turned into fully formed digital characters using a technique called motion capture. For Warcraft, Jones took motion capture to another level, capturing the physical movement of the actors digitally onto a matrix, which then created a computer- generated character. During filming the cast wore suits that used tracking markers, and cameras were mounted on their heads to illuminate their visual personas.
But the meticulousness of the CGI—Jones created 2,000 visual effects shots and the audience gets to view the orcs’ facial countenances in full close-up—comes across as jarring in the film. Critics have slammed the movie on social media, particularly in Europe where the film has already been released.
In my three years of owning an unlimited card I’ve never seen a film as bad as #Warcraft terrible CGI, horrible plot and bad acting. Awful.
— Sean McBay (@seanmcbae) June 1, 2016
Variety wrote that Warcraft “aims for fresh and eye-popping and yet ends up shopworn and rather tacky,” while the New York Daily News complained the movie “over-indulges on the kinetic visuals.” The Scotsman slammed: “The cast… struggle to communicate why we should care about a CGI-rendered world full of big-toothed creatures that look like those pig guards from Return of the Jedi. Game of Thrones this ain’t.”
The negative response began when the first trailer was unveiled to a chorus of disapproval last November. The critical response begs the question whether the director’s determination to have Warcraft characters resemble their video game counterparts ultimately proved counter-productive.
So the Warcraft film is a mess. Weak story, weak characters and bland to bad acting. And it has that cgi sheen, that i really hate. 3/10
— Martin Jørgensen (@xwing_t65) May 25, 2016
Heat Street can generate some light on how the visual effects ended up conveying sub-Doctor Who TV sensibilities. A source, who worked on the film when it had the code name of Conflagration, said Jones’ drive for innovation backfired as the Warcraft creative team failed to take into account that the trailer would be scrutinized so closely when viewed on smaller screens. That misjudgment over the film’s pre-release perception has potentially alienated a significant core of its audience in the runup to its release—people who are put off by the appearance of the orcs.
The source said: “We were doing cutting-edge live, on-set animation as the action was captured. It was a new way to do it and see how the animation would look in post-production .
“When Warcraft began having screenings showing off the new technology, it looked great on a 4K projector. But when it was compressed to 2K , the effects looked cheap and dodgy. People are judging the quality of the effects from their tiny YouTube windows.”
Director Jones says the technology, pioneered by Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), the company started by Star Wars‘ George Lucas, was fundamental to his vision of the film, which had its Hollywood premiere on Monday night.
He told the UK’s BBC Newsbeat website: “When we started working on this project, I did a re-write on this script. There was a pretty dramatic change of emphasis from humans being the good guys to the creature, the orc, being the bad guys.
“What I wanted to do is spend a lot more time with the orcs and humanize them. In order to do that I was going to have to do a close up on the orc.”
Jones added: “I don’t think there was a limitation as far as technology as far as what we were able to achieve. The limitation is about time and money.”
Warcraft is expected to gross an underwhelming $25 million during its opening weekend when it is released in the U.S. on Friday. But it has so far performed strongly in the foreign countries where it was released prior to the U.S. Will the international market end up helping the movie save face?