To you and just you, because you want the first and second games adapted before the third and thus can't accept or even acknowledge that the third would work very well without doing so.
So in your mind, your objectively right, and any disagreement with that is a denial of absolute truth.
Can a WC3 film work without adapting the stuff up to it? Yes. Is it shooting itself in the foot by doing so? Also yes.
I'd also point out that you're suggesting an adaptation that doesn't begin at the start of an overall story, which is a rarity in fiction, so I'd say the burden of proof is on you. I tried to find a precedent for this, and the only real example I could find was The Shannara Chronicles.
Doesn't matter. You have to look far into the background of the events between WC2 and WC3 to have any idea of this. Once again, it's irrelevant.
What do you mean "any idea of this?" The second Horde mission explicitly deals with overrunning an internment camp. There's no ambiguity here.
Considering that's exactly what happens in WC3, no, I'm not. The orcs run with their tails between their legs while the humans are attacked by a relentless undead army in the game. It's a microscopically small leap from there to have the undead just be attacking both as the focus of the story and still be a faithful adaption.
No, it isn't. If you have the Scourge attacking the Alliance and Horde at the same time, this means that:
-You're operating on a compressed timetable - the Scourge doesn't really show its full strength until about halfway through the Alliance campaign. So that severely compresses buildup, and Arthas's fall.
-It removes any sense of subterfuge in the Scourge - Plague of Undeath? Gone. Cult of the Damned? Irrelevant. The Alliance's impotence? Non-existent.
-This also affects the Horde - it changes the entire context of them leaving the Eastern Kingdoms. Medivh becomes less of an insgitagor in that if the Horde's being attacked by the Scourge, they don't need Medivh to point them west, they've got the motivations they need. This further changes the dynamics between Thrall and Grom, as there's no a clear threat bar a more insidious ones (Grom senses the Legion long before they appear directly), and Thrall's no longer caught offguard by human survivours in Kalimdor.
You can follow the bare bones plotline with this, but the entire context is changed in doing so.
Why would you ever bother watching any adaption of anything you like ever? It's not "dumbed down" it's skipping over the parts that aren't actually important to tell the story, just like as in my previous example how President Whitmore rose to power and how the aliens turned into a race of planet wreckers isn't important to tell the story of Independence Day.
Well, I watched every Harry Potter movie despite them being universally worse than the books, so you tell me.
It's possible to get great works that are poor adaptations (e.g. Starship Troopers, The Hobbit trilogy), but that's a different point. Here's some issues with what you're suggesting:
1: If we treat Warcraft as an overall narrative extending from WC1 to Dragonflight, starting off with WC3 is starting an adaptation a fair way into this story. There's no getting around that.
2: Ergo, you're shooting yourself in the foot, because you're forced to either ignore what comes before, or compress it.
3: You're jeprodizing the ability to tell those stories, because you're either skipping over them, or relegating them to prequel status.
You bring up Independence Day, but what you're suggesting is something similar to starting with Resurgence, and making ID1 a prequel. Is it possible to start with Resurgence and get the gist of what happened beforehand? Yeah, probably. Would I recommend doing so? Even ignoring the downgrade in quality, I wouldn't.
Part of the "dumbed down" issue is also that it's easier to adapt WC1-BtDP and improve their stories through adaptation, whereas it's much harder to see a WC3 adaptation improving on the source material. It's part of why I have no interest in a Mass Effect movie or TV series, because I don't see the point in making an adaptation that's almost certainly going to be of inferior quality, and wouldn't distinguish itself.
Because you're fixated on the story of Warcraft, so you want near perfect 1 to 1 series of movie adaptions that explains everything leading up to Warcraft 3, even though it's not at all necessary to make a great adaption of Warcraft 3 the game.
I never said there had to be a 1:1 adaptation, it's rare to get a 1:1 adaptation of anything, and it's silly to demand as such.
For a famous example, the Lord of the Rings. It took about 15 minutes or so to explain all of the details necessary the audience needed to know to get into the story. Boom! We knew who the villain was, the significance of the One Ring, why destroying it was so important, and the story started at the Shire from there. It didn't need to spend 2 or 3 movies explaining about Sauron and the Ring and going through the events of the Hobbit, it would've been a waste of time and only the most diehard purists cared.
It's the same with this theoretical WC3 movie, except that it's even simpler than that. The thing would probably barely even have to spend 5 minutes explaining about the world and the orc and human factions. What matters is this: There's an Alliance of Human Kingdoms, there's an Orc Horde, they fought each other at some point. Just establish that and from there take a bit of time to establish the setting of the humans and orcs, how they live and such. Then the Undead show up and the orcs and humans have to fight against them. There, you've got your perfectly good adaption and it didn't dumb down anything.
-LotR isn't the best equivalent. Could you do what you're suggesting? Yes, potentially, but a better equivalent would be the first 15 minutes recapping something like the War of the Ancients. The difference is that apart from The Hobbit, there's no direct work to adapt pre-LotR. There's no "War of the Last Alliance" to adapt for instance. This isn't the case for Warcraft. Prior to 3, by all rights, you have 4 movies worth of adaptations that you could adapt first.
-Your outline is already dumbing stuff down. If your premise of WC3 is that "orcs and humans exist, undead turn up, they have to fight them," you have a far simpler, less interesting story than WC3, and you're diverging from what happens in the game. FFS, in WC3, the Alliance and Horde don't even fight the undead together until the final campaign of the game.
It's a great comparison, you just don't want to acknowledge that it is because it would completely destroy your own point. Just like Independence Day, an original work, didn't have to show a bunch of stuff that led to the situation the movie found itself in, this theoretical Warcraft 3, a non-original work, wouldn't need to show the orc arrival to Azeroth and the subsequent 2 wars because it doesn't have any relevance to nor is required to understand the story of a movie that started with Warcraft 3. In both cases all that needs to be done is establish the world, establish the two forces in this case Human Kingdoms and Orc Horde, establish that they fought before, and go from there. Everything before that could be very easily relegated to the first 10 minutes or a few lines or flashbacks at some point later on.
Again, I don't see it as a good comparison.
-ID is an original work, a Warcraft adaptation isn't.
-ID is the first installment in its IP, WC3 isn't.
-There's much more backstory pre-WC3 than there is ID1.
This isn't a good comparison.
We wouldn't be having this discussion if Warcraft was a movie first and started with Warcraft 3. Ask yourself this: If Warcraft was a movie first with no adaption would all the portal other world and 2 wars be needed to tell this theoretical Warcraft 3 movie? The answer is no. It wouldn't have any significance and the only reason you're arguing otherwise is because of your biased fixation on the Warcraft lore.
It's very easy to accuse someone of bias. I can just as easily accuse you of bias against the lore, since you're fixated on WC3 to the exclusion of everything else.
To reiterate:
-Can you start with an adaptation of WC3? Yes.
-Is it a good idea? No.
Again, point me to an example where a fictional setting has been adapted by film that didn't start at the beginning. Shannara aside, I can actually remember back when it was announced that Chronicles of Narnia was going to be re-adapted, starting with...The Silver Chair. Y'know, the penultimate book in the series. People were flabbergasted and rightfully so. Could you do that? Well, yes, it would be doable. Would it be a good choice? Not really. You'd lose a lot in the process.
It's the same principle. Starting with WC3 is shooting the story in the foot, because you're ensuring that the movie has to do the heavy lifting of covering prior installments, therefore leaving less time to develop its own story.
What would happen is the people watching would get the point and simply move on, since those who saw the precious installments would already know what it was that lead to this point and the people who haven't don't need to know and probably don't care anyway for the story to work, just like if they were to start the movie adaptions by adapting Warcraft 3.
In this scenario, there's no prior adapted installments. There isn't a single film I know of where it was expected of an audience to read books before seeing the film. LotR didn't start with Return of the King, for instance.
Just like the actual Warcraft movie should've told things entirely from the human POV, with the orcs being faceless enemies that only exist as an enemy force.
Completely disagree.
It does apply to the orcs in Warcraft and especially the Scourge and the Burning Legion. The orcs were something that only existed as an enemy force for the space of 2 and a half games, and that was fine. Then in something covered only in the novels leading to the third game most of the Horde did an almost complete 180 and became more or less peaceful instead of the bloodthirsty maniacs they started as. Essentially becoming so alien to their original characterization they were effectively an entirely different faction in an old faction's skin.
No, it doesn't apply. You can't compare the orcs to the Harvesters in the "faceless" aspect. In ID1, we never see anything from the Harvesters' POV, in ID2, we see things from their POV at the very start, and that's about it. This has never been true of the orcs - they're literally "faced" by the Alliance, we play stuff from their POV, they're comprehensible in a way the Harvesters aren't.
The same is true of the Scourge and Burning Legion. We play as the Scourge, and even when we aren't, there's distinct Scourge/Legion characters that exist. The only Harvester "character" that exists is the queen, and by her nature, she's incomprehensible. The Harvesters can't even communicate with humans except through using human puppets.
As said again and again, they wouldn't be lost because everything that comes before the theoretical Warcraft 3 movie could be very easily explained in a very short time if it needs to be explained at all. Establish the setting, establish the factions, go from there. It takes very little time to do, is extremely simple, and nobody would be lost whether they were a fan or not because there's nothing complicated about it.
I don't dispute it could be established, I'm disputing that things would be better for it.
Actually, no, it isn't. The war doesn't even start until the end of the movie. It's a "leads up to the war" movie, and it's not even a good one at that. The plot is driven by the orc side with the human side having little to no input into anything that happens until the war actually begins.
Except that's false. You seem to be equating "the war" with the battle at the end. That isn't true. From what we see on screen, we have the forest ambush, and a battle (yes, battle) in the canyon. Off-screen, it's established that the Horde is overrunning numerous forts and settlements. The battle at the end was a Hail Mary for Stormwind.
Warcraft suffers because it focuses on the character development and establishment of one faction over the war that people actually came to the movie to see. The characters that were being developed didn't have a chance for an arc because the conflict to actually facilitate those arcs, the war, took much too long to actually get started. What's more, it focuses on the faction that has little to no presence on the world that the movie primarily takes place, meaning that the setting itself suffered.
You seem to be conflating "people" with yourself.
The war, such as it is, isn't the be all and end all of character development. Character development begins at the very start of the movie for Durotan, since he's put in the unenviable position of Gul'dan having saved his son, but having used fel magic to do so, which is a microcosm for the orcs as a whole.
You can have the greatest war movie in the world, you can have a war that runs the entire time, that doesn't matter if the characters aren't interesting. It's what distinguishes something like Independece Day (enjoyable characters) with Battle: Los Angeles - both are alien invasion movies, only one of them has any characters of note. The Warcraft movie does a good job of developing its orc characters, just not its human ones.
They could have easily been interesting, but nobody had any reason to care because there was no war. The threat that the orcs had to face in the movie was completely internal to them, wouldn't have been different if they hadn't left their world in the first place, and the humans were bit characters looking in, rather than the focus that they should've been. With a war, there not only would've been a lot more action to keep audience attention but the human characters could react to said war to show and develop their characterization.
Again, I disagree. I don't care about a war if the people fighting in that war aren't interesting. I enjoy replaying action scenes from movies as much as the next guy, that doesn't mean that a movie can survive with all action and no characterization (well, maybe it can - Transformers managed it I guess).
Avengers needed the films leading up to it because it was a team movie, therefore the characters were the primary focus. The Avengers didn't have the runtime needed to establish and develop each member and it would've been detrimental if they tried. Avengers didn't need to do this because they had several movies to establish and develop each significant character, therefore all that was needed was to have them play off each other.
The WC3 movie wouldn't need this because it's whole premise doesn't need such a character focus. All that would be needed is a fairly brief segment showing how the Orcs and Humans got to the point they have at the beginning of the movie, and that's if the adaption decided that anything that happened deserved the runtime, which they could get away with skipping over. Warcraft focuses on the event, in this case the war, not the characters, it always has.
WC3 IS character focused though. Maybe not to the extent of The Avengers, but far more than its predecessors.
No, less time on characterization overall. The orcs staying just generic bad guys for the first film at least would've given room for the humans and their world to develop. Focusing on the war would've served as a backdrop to the human character development that did happen. Then the second film would've focused on the orc side of things and given them a chance to develop beyond simply being generic bad guys. Then the third movie would've had the room to develop both beyond what had been established and play them off each other. It would've resulted in a far far better movie to focus on the humans and their world first but just as importantly on the actual war.
That's hypothetical. Could it work? Sure. But it's taking a big risk.
I also don't buy that a film only has time to characterize one side during a conflict. Look at Avatar for instance. Both the humans and na'vi are characterized and developed through the entire runtime, and if you think that's a stretch, bear in mind that Warcraft (the movie) and Avatar are very similar in premise (alien species flees dying world to colonize another; the invaders are much more powerful than the natives, but the natives are able to band together and are able to drive the invaders back, at least temporarily, aided by one of the aliens going rogue and aiding the indigenous population).
The Chitauri were the generic bad guys that Loki had gotten from Thanos to help conquer the planet for him. This is explained early on. The Chitauri are the cusp of the conflict that the whole movie spends building towards, the final obstacle that the Avengers have to deal with to resolve the plot. It was an epic fight to close out the movie and the Chitauri didn't need characterization, just like the orcs in the actual Warcraft movie and in the first couple games didn't need any.
Well again, I disagree, in that I don't see the orcs and chitauri being analagous.
Warcraft has always, ALWAYS, been defined by the Alliance and Horde dynamic. There isn't a single game in the series where that isn't true (except maybe WC3). If you have a film where only one side is characterized, from the fans side, you're spurring half the fanbase. From a film standpoint, you're left with generic orcs - evil creatures who do evil things for evil reasons.
Yes. It was "go here and slaughter the PATHETIC humans!" The orcs had functionally next to no depth and you had to read through the manual and other supplements to see any depth whatsoever... and what depth was there as still pretty minimal. Until Warcraft 3, which changes the orcs so drastically as to no longer be the same faction at all.
Yes, the depth of the orcs was minimal pre-WC3, doesn't mean it wasn't there. Which is why even for this period, works have retroactively added more depth.
Which is why you focus on the humans and the setting and world building first with the war already in full swing to establish what is being fought for and what's so important about this war. That's establishing the stakes.
But the stakes ARE established. There's no ambiguity as to what the stakes actually are. In the context of the film, here are the stakes:
-Draenor is dying, and there's no going back.
-Azeroth can provide the orcs a new home.
-Azeroth is already inhabited.
There's a reason why the tagline for the film was "two peoples, one world." It summarizes the central conflict in a single sentence. And if we're talking about stakes for the humans, that's clear, since for the majority of the film, they're on the backfoot.
Maybe WC3 needs to be several movies on it's own, but that's not the point. The point is WC3 itself doesn't need to be the fifth movie or the fourth or anything other than the first in order to work perfectly fine because, once again, the events preceding WC3 aren't necessary for the audience to know in order to be able to understand what's going on in this theoretical WC3 movie.
We're going in circles at this point. You can start with WC3, just as you can start anywhere in an overall story via adaptation. That doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Nearly everything is cliche now. What matters is how one is setting the characters, establishing the setting, and the conflict of the story. There is almost always a "these guys are just evil" faction in any sort of war story, said faction needs little to no characterization because who they are isn't important, what is important is the threat they present to the characters. The desperate struggles against that "these guys are just evil" faction by the other good faction are what a good war movie is made of.
I disagree that "these guys are evil" are what makes a good war movie ipso facto. Plenty of war movies/TV series humanize both sides and do so to the story's betterment - Band of Brothers, Enemy at the Gates, Animatrix,** Henry V, etc.*
*Not that Henry V is a war movie, but it does humanize both the English and French - the Battle of Agincourt is presented as something horrific for everyone involved. If you only humanize one side, the impact is halved.
**In the sense that both the humans and machines are humanized, and this is all done in less than an hour. By the war's end, no side has the moral high ground.
Can you tell a good, morally binary story? Yes. Except Warcraft isn't morally binary, at least for the Alliance and Horde. Sure, it started out that way, but who actually considers that a better paradigm than the shades of grey we've had for awhile?
A bad war story focuses on the bad guy faction's character to the near complete exclusion of the good guy faction's character and has little to no actual war in it, like the actual Warcraft movie did.
Well again, I disagree with the very premise. I don't think the Warcraft movie can even be boiled down to "bad guys and good guys." Sure, the orcs are closer to being "bad" than "good," but it's reductive to say "they're evil." We know why orcs are doing what they're doing, they're not invading for shits and giggles, they're invading for the very survival of their species.
No, I'm paying Paul from my own pockets, to use your saying. The world building failed because the movie was obsessed with focusing on the orcs to the exclusion of the humans and their world. I'm paying Paul by focusing on the part of the world building that is actually important to this movie.
Again, establish the world first, characters involved in said world next, then bring in the external threat, then finally expand upon said external threat. The orcs are that external threat, so they can't be expanded upon in the first movie, what they are threatening and why it's important that it is being threatened are what needs expanding.
Again, I disagree. I've already explained why, but again, see Avatar. Humans are the external threat, they aren't faceless monsters, the movie takes time to humanize both sides. That Warcraft failed to flesh out the humans as well as the orcs isn't proof that it can't be done, because it HAS been done.
"Humans from yet another stock medieval setting" is pretty much the vast majority of the viewpoint for medieval fantasy fiction and people still are interested in it to this day. What matters is how those "humans from yet another stock medieval setting" are established and develop. Had the movie focused upon the humans and the setting with the orcs being this mysterious aggressive evil force, the movie would've been able to make compelling human characters and an interesting entertaining epic war. Then the next movie would've done the same with the orcs, rounding things out and the human characters that did appear would've already been interesting because they had already had time to develop.
Okay, sure, but again, this is a hypothetical. You're taking the risk that people will wait an entire movie to see the other side fleshed out. And the premise relies on the old "evil monsters invade."
The reviewers preferred the orc characters because they were the main focus of the movie. Focusing on the humans would have allowed the world to be fleshed out more and set the stage for the orcs to be expanded upon in the next entry. It wouldn't strip one of the few redeeming features the actual Warcraft movie had because that redeeming feature only existed due to focusing on the orcs instead of the humans, an issue that would've been negated simply by focusing on the humans instead of the orcs. We'd be saying the exact opposite if that happened but because the film was treating the orcs as the big bad evil faction that's killing the humans because they're bloodthirsty maniacs... as far as the viewer sees we don't care, The reason we care that the human characters are bland in the Warcraft movie is because the film wastes it's time on the orc faction when it hadn't even developed the humans yet. In any story there needs to be a big bad evil threat that doesn't need the character development so the other has room to breathe.
Then the second movie would give the big bad evil reasons for doing what they are doing and expand them in general, allowing us to look back at the previous movie and think "oh! So THAT is why they did that!" Character development is a precious resource that can't afford to be wasted and the actual Warcraft movie wasted it by having it backwards and focusing on the orcs.
Again, hypotheticals. In an alternate scenario, we'd be complaining that the film waited too long to focus on the orcs.
The problem with your proposal is that:
1: It alienates half the fanbase by focusing on only one faction.
2: It relies on the old cliche of "orcs are evil, do evil things."[/quote][/quote]
