Friday, November 6, 2015

Meanwhile, back in Azeroth...

It's BlizzCon, which means that this got viewed and released into the wild:


The oldest Mini-Red was confused. "World of Warcraft?" she asked. "They really improved the CGI on their expac trailers."

"No," I replied. "It's for the movie."

"There's a movie?"

"Yeah. Been in development for a decade or so."

"Looks pretty good," the youngest mini-Red added.

"True, but the dialogue is a bit clunky."

(I decided not to point out the obvious Moses references to Thrall in the trailer. I presume a helluva lot more of those will be in the movie.)

***

Seeing a full trailer, I'm wondering whether this is one of those movies where the best parts are all in the trailers. (I'm thinking the same thing of Star Wars: The Force Awakens as well, so it's not just Warcraft.)

Why? Well, trailers have now been honed to an art form, making even bad movies look good.

Like, oh, this one:


But in terms of Warcraft, I'm really thinking of this:


In a pre-LOTR special effects environment, it's really a pretty good trailer. And the characters didn't sound that bad in their acting, either. But if you actually watch the Dungeons and Dragons movie, you realize pretty quickly how lousy it is: clunky dialogue, confusing plot, metagaming*, and bad acting.

Looking at the trailer for Warcraft, I honestly rolled my eyes at the Thrall parts. I know the story, but the Green Jesus criticism that is often lobbed in Thrall's direction is going to haunt this movie. And he's not even a main character.

For the sake of the MMO genre, I hope it doesn't suck, but I've a bad feeling that some of the worst parts of the Warcraft storyline are going to bite this movie in the ass.

***

Oh, and continuing the tradition of the Warcraft movie being upstaged by Star Wars, the Star Wars: The Force Awakens international trailer was released:


Yes, it has Japanese subtitles, but it shouldn't detract from the trailer experience.

All of the extra scenes not in the US trailer make the movie's secrecy all the more interesting.

Will it succeed? I think that's more on J.J. Abrams than anyone else.

***

While digging up the D&D Movie's trailer, I started punching in some old trailers from movies that I liked when I was a kid. These movies were much older than me, and I used to watch them on television when there were a lot of independent television stations and they would show old 50's and 60's era movies during the day.

Like, say, this one:

Yes, that's really Ernest Borgnine. And yes, they really butchered Viking society in this flick.


Or this one:
Yeah, that's Pat Boone.






*There's even a scene where one character accuses the other of being just low level. I mean, who actually wrote this script, anyway? Was it a riff on a D&D campaign?


EtA: Clarified when I was talking about the D&D movie trailer versus the movie itself.

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