Warcraft: The Beginning

A race of hulking manlike creatures invades the human world through a magical portal, growling unintelligibly around their huge tusks, while humans posture and declaim, struggling vainly to be heard over the bombast of Ramin Djawadi’s music. Fans of the video-game franchise may be able to follow the incoherent plot. Then again, it may not matter; they may simply rhapsodize over the breathtaking CGI and nonstop battle scenes. For the rest of us, it’s just another lousy video-game movie with pathetic delusions of Game of Thrones—all the thunder, flying arrows and flashing broadswords but none of the political intrigue or subtlety of character. Even the names aren’t clearly spoken; blame director Duncan Jones and his co-writers Charles Leavitt and Chris Metzen for concocting such silly names to begin with. J.L.