Video game movies used to be the armpit of Hollywood, but there was also a time when the same could be said of comic book films. With Need for Speed unlikely to have changed minds about adapting games for the screen it may be up to Duncan Jones' Warcraft to make an impression. The film certainly has the director to do it, and an impressive cast led by Ben Foster who spoke to IGN about his role in the sweeping fantasy epic...
Foster: "The character in Warcraft that I play is named Medivh. He’s a mage, which is essentially a sorcerer. He came up in a time protecting an area, and the way he protected this area was through magic. As peace returned to this land he took a break. He hung up his staff, so to speak, or let his guns get dusty. We meet him as his friends are returning asking for his help in a battle."
Worlds of Warcraft is a whole series of strategy RPG games without a straight-through narrative to follow. So figuring out a story angle was paramount, and Foster spoke about Jones' approach to doing just that...
Foster: "What's exciting about Duncan Jones' take on this video game is that it shows both sides of the war. It shows both sides of a conflict, which is exciting to me. It's not just a video game turned into a movie. It's asking, hopefully, an important question of, where do we limit our compassion for what we consider to be the bad guys?"
Although Foster's performance wasn't motion-capture, he still had very high praise for the visual effects done by ILM....
Foster: "The way that they're pushing motion-capture -- I just saw some of the test footage -- it's unlike anything I've ever seen. It's performance-capture. It pushes it to the next level. It's going to be one helluva 3D event."
Paula Patton, Travis Fimmel, Toby Kebbell, Dominic Cooper, Dennis Haysbert, Felicity Jones, Hiroyuki Sanada, Svetlana Khodchenkova, Clancy Brown, and Rob Kazinsky will star in Warcraft when it opens March 11th 2016.
