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The new 'Warcraft' movie is a major disappointment — and I'm a huge 'Warcraft' fan

It's pretty rare to go into a movie expecting nothing and get less than that out of it, but "Warcraft" somehow accomplished that feat.

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I gave three years of my life to "World of Warcraft," the gigantic online world that, at one point, boasted 12 million active subscribers. Though I can't see myself ever going back, I have a ton of fond memories of running around the enormous fantasy world of Azeroth, taking in all of the game's great quests with the friends I made along the way.

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Durotan, one of the nice orcs in "Warcraft," who is pretty sad about being in this movie. Facebook/Legendary Pictures

My time with the game didn't make me want it as a film. It's a super fun world to inhabit as a player, sure, but the writing was always cheesy (in a bad way), and it's a giant melting pot of different generic fantasy tropes that I always figured wouldn't be much fun to watch.

It turns out that my instinct was spot on.

To its credit, the "Warcraft" movie is a fairly faithful adaptation of the original 1994 strategy game (all of its characters are either way older or dead by the time "World of Warcraft" takes place), but there's no real value in faithfully adapting a story that wasn't very good to start. Its sequels had slightly more narrative weight, but that first game is just another fantasy war between angry, green-skinned orcs and noble, virtuous humans. 

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No, really: the original game was just called "Warcraft: Orcs & Humans." That's such well-worn territory that I'm sure the writers of the "Angry Birds" movie had more fun crafting a plot.

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Every now and then, I recognized a location from the game and got bummed because I wasn't actually playing the game. Legendary

Easily the worst thing about "Warcraft," though, is that it was only made for people who like the games.

My gut feeling while watching it is that it would be impossible to follow unless you already know the lore of the world. Tech Insider senior editor Ben Gilbert (who has never played the games) confirmed this when he saw the movie.

The film's story is seemingly missing 45 minutes of world-building, but even that wouldn't have saved it from its mindnumbingly boring action sequences and wooden acting. That's not to say the cast members are untalented; I just get the feeling none of them wanted to be involved with this thing.

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"Warcraft" had a reported budget of $160 million, backing from a major studio in Legendary Pictures and a talented writer-director in Duncan Jones (who did "Moon" and "Source Code"), things most video game movies could only dream of having. None of that was enough to overcome the fact that "Warcraft" is a lot more fun to play than it is to watch. 

It may be odd to call something "disappointing" when I expected nothing from it, but that's a testament to how bad it was. It could've been a film that attracted new people to the games. It could've been a well-done extension of a beloved franchise. Instead, it caters exclusively to people who already know these stories and these characters in better places. And it's not even competent at doing that.

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