The highly anticipated Warcraft is less than three months away and today we’ve got a new TV spot to remind us all that "War is coming." The film promises us huge battle sequences full of computer generated orcs, but the new footage here shows us battles which are decidedly smaller, though no less powerful. Check it out.
While this is technically a TV spot, at a minute in length it’s longer than most. They use the extra time very well. The spot opens with a one on one battle between a human warrior and an orc. Then it ends with the same thing. In the opening, there’s nobody else around. But in the climactic sequence, we see the two fighting while the rest of a major battle is going on around them. We’ve seen a few shots of the two massive armies colliding in the film, but it’s been hard to really get a feeling for what the battle sequences will really look like. These smaller, focused skirmishes make things a little easier to make out.
The trailer's opening sequence, which actually runs for half of the spot, is by far the most interesting, as we haven’t seen anything like it before in any previous marketing. Everything else in the trailers has been full of action, or people, or color. This is nearly entirely devoid of all of those. We only have two characters, neither one is particularly easy to see, the ground is plain and brown and without any green at all. We also never really see the orc that is in the fight because we see most of the sequence from his perspective. Eventually the two warriors do clash. We hope this fight sequence doesn’t end as abruptly as the TV spot implies. It look great, and we want to see more.
With a movie named Warcraft, it’s more than a little important that the action set pieces come out looking great. Since we’re not expecting the movie to deal with a great deal of resource gathering, while it’s a major part of the original games it doesn’t necessarily make for high tension filmmaking, that mean that the battles will be the focus. The film will pit the orcs, who are escaping their crumbling world, against the humans, who are trying to defend their land from the incoming orcs. The two sides will begin by fighting each other, before looking toward a greater threat and, at least trying to find peace.
What do you think of the new spot? Does it make you any more, or less, excited for Warcraft? Will this movie be worth all the hype? Warcraft hits theaters June 10.
