Some people had hoped, after months of hype and the pedigree of director Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code), that Warcraft might break the long and storied Curse Of Bad Video Game Movies. I have some sad news for those people. Maybe video game adaptations were just never meant to be.
Warcraft, which comes out June 10, is a whirlwind of CGI effects and snazzy costumes that never quite coalesces into a watchable film. Longtime fans of the series might get a kick out of seeing the likes of Medivh (Ben Foster) and Durotan (Toby Kebbell) played by Hollywood actors, but it’s tough to get invested in a movie that feels so soulless. Warcraft has very few redeeming qualities. The performances are mediocre, the writing is full of cliches, and the editing is confusing when it’s trying to be clever. (Both the orcs and humans speak real-life English, but the movie attempts to persuade us, by means of a clumsy transition halfway through the film, that the orcs are actually speaking their own language. It’s not very good.)
The fundamental flaw in Warcraft is the same flaw we find in most video game movies: It takes itself too seriously. These games are set in a world full of in-jokes and surreal humor, one that’s inhabited by a race of giant panda bears because the developers at Blizzard really liked one of their own April Fool’s jokes. Even when the Warcraft games get dark, and they do get dark, they’ve always been adept at having fun with their players. The film does no such thing. If only this movie had the charm of a Warcraft unit who’s been clicked too many times.
In case you’re curious: I’ve played through all three main Warcraft games and went on a WoW kick back in 2005. I was the guy at the screening who knew who Thrall was and who most certainly recognized that the creature who popped up for a second in that one swamp was a murloc. I could tell you the difference between a Death Knight and a Lich King and I have many fond memories of destroying fools with my Night Elf army. So I should be the ideal target audience for a movie like Warcraft, one that tries to turn the story of the First War between orcs and humans into a summer blockbuster.
Yet I just couldn’t buy in. Maybe the premise was flawed from the start. Warcraft opens with a shot of the vicious orc Horde, all teeth and screams, as it introduces us to Durotan and his pregnant wife. In just a few minutes we’re zipping through so many cities—Ironforge, Stormwind, Dalaran—that even for a Warcraft buff it might be tough to keep things straight. Rather than give some breathing room to Durotan and his human counterpart, Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmel), Warcraft insists on introducing character after character, none of them pleasant. There’s Callan (Burkely Duffield), Lothar’s plot device of a son. There’s the bumbling mage Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer), who is far more interesting in the games. There’s the Guardian Medivh, whose motives and actions are never quite clear. There’s a king, a queen, some knights. There are a bunch of orcs who get a lot of screen time that could’ve gone toward actual character development. There are too many characters, too many subplots, and not nearly enough reasons to care about them all.
And then there’s Garona (Paula Patton), whose fangs are so utterly silly that they often distract from her performance, which is just as ridiculous. Warcraft devotes many minutes to Garona: her enslavement at the hands of her own people; her snarling threats; her unconvincing romantic trist with the main character. Her character, a half-orc, half-human* warrior who seems destined to bring peace to the two races, is poorly crafted and kind of a drag to watch. A stronger actress could have helped made Garona more compelling, but with so many factors working against her, even that might not have worked. She is unabashedly dull.
Even the nasty warlock Gul’dan (Daniel Wu), easily the most compelling character in the film, never quite lives up to his video game pedigree. He spends most of his time draining the souls out of his prisoners’ bodies, which is fun to watch, but he never feels threatening. The stakes are never really there. Warcraft spends very little time trying to convince the audience why anyone should care that Gul’dan and his orcs are invading the world of humans, or why it even matters.
Rather than tapping into the goofy core that makes a game like World of Warcraft interesting, the Warcraft movie aims for grittiness, missing the mark quite a bit. It just doesn’t work. The lore is too campy. This is a world where a mage’s most popular spell transforms his enemies into sheep, yet Warcraft acts as if it’s a green-screen version of Game of Thrones. At my theater, the biggest laughs came not from the occasional bouts of slapstick comedy but from the miserable archmages of Dalaran, whose CGI-enhanced eyes look especially absurd when you’re supposed to take them seriously.
I had hoped Warcraft would at a minimum be entertaining, but really, I’ve had more enjoyable two-hour sessions wiping on Molten Core. At least the armor looks good.
There was a time when the X-Men franchise was one of the biggest around. The original X-Men opened with the fifth-biggest opening weekend of all time back in 2000 ($54 million) and the biggest non-sequel debut ever back in the day. When X2: X-Men United opened with $85m back in May of 2003, it was the fourth-biggest opening weekend of all time. When X-Men: The Last Stand debuted on this weekend back in 2006, it snagged the second-biggest single day of all time with a $45m Friday and ended up with just the fifth $100m debut ever and the fourth-top Fri-Sun opening weekend of all time.
So if I seem overly harsh on what could be a $75-$85 million Fri-Mon debut, it’s because the franchise was once a god among insects. X-Men: Apocalypse had the fourth-lowest opening day out of nine X-Men films. Opening on the same weekend as two of the biggest entries, the ninth X-Men movie (and the sixth team-up X-Men movie) earned $26.4 million on Friday, including $8.2m in Thursday previews.
That means it did 31% of its Friday business on Thursday night, compared to Days of Future Past ($8.1 million Thursday/$35.5m Friday) which made 22% of its opening day business in previews.
Even with inflation and a 3D bump factored in, it had a smaller Friday than X2 ($31m), X-Men: The Last Stand ($45m), X-Men Origins: Wolverine ($34m), X-Men: Days of Future Past ($35m), and Deadpool ($47m). When you factor in the 3D bump, it arguably didn’t sell that many more tickets than X-Men: First Class ($21m back in 2011 in 2D).
We should acknowledge that Fox and Walt Disney chose to inexplicably go head-to-head this weekend, with Alice Through the Looking Glass opening yesterday as well. But X-Men: Days of Future Past had to contend with the second $38 million Fri-Mon weekend of Godzilla, which arguably played to the same demos, back in 2014. So that’s not in itself an excuse.
We should also note that this Bryan Singer trilogy capper received some miserable reviews and that it will be arguably the only comic book superhero movie this year that really wasn’t offering anything audiences hadn’t seen before. The last installment offered a superb gimmick: an adaptation of a fan-favorite time travel story that combined the First Class cast with the original trilogy participants.
This one was merely another sequel with the less popular newbies. Yes, they had Jennifer Lawrence as a proverbial action lead. They had Oscar Isaac fresh off The Force Awakens as the title baddie. They even had Olivia Munn as fan-favorite Psylocke. But, along with Alexandra Shipp as a younger Storm, these would-be “incentives” were mostly wasted in order to yet again focus on Michael Fassbender’s Magneto.
The reviews made this very clear, and if we make an argument that reviews matter for movies like this it’s when they affirm or deny that a given film offers the stuff you wanted to see. Or maybe the popularity of the X-Men franchise really is tied into how much Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine shows up with the team. That’s a scary thought, especially if Hugh Jackman really does choose to hang up the claws.
I will be honest, two years ago I expected a bigger debut for X-Men: Days of Future Past. The well-reviewed “Franchise All Stars to the Rescue” installment had ten years of inflation and a 3D bump on X-Men: The Last Stand. I also knew that the X-Men films have famously terrible legs, so I figured that it had to make the majority of whatever it was going to make on its opening weekend.
But while Days of Future Past did make less on its debut weekend than The Last Stand ($110.5 million vs. $122.8m), it was a slightly leggier blockbuster getting awfully close to the Brett Ratner film’s $234m domestic total. Moreover, that ten-year span and 3D bump paid off overseas, when the Bryan Singer film made an eye-popping $513m overseas for a $747m worldwide cume.
This from a franchise whose previous high was $457 million global. So when we look at that $26m opening day and some potentially grim domestic forecasts, there is a likely silver lining. First and foremost, Fox brought this latest installment in for around $178 million, which was a lot less than the $220 million-ish Days of Future Past. Second of all, the film could stand to make a lot less than the last installment in America if it continues to crush it overseas.
If the film plays like Days of Future Past over the weekend, we’re looking at a $68 million Fri-Sun/$83m Fri-Mon opening weekend. And then if it has the legs of that last movie domestically, it ends up with $173m domestic. As long as it still plays well overseas (it had $130m going into the weekend), no harm, no foul. But if it plays like The Last Stand, this could get ugly. It’ll be a $60m/$72m weekend and will end its domestic run with $137m.
Now we could mix-and-match those potential outcomes ($73 million weekend and a $151m U.S. total or an $83m weekend and a $156m domestic cume. Of course, if it makes another $400-$500m overseas this is almost trivia. But this will likely be a severe domestic downturn for a somewhat vital “Can the franchise thrive without Wolverine?” installment. We’ll know more tomorrow, but for the record it should be noted that Fox sold the heck out of this thing.
The Indistinguishable X-Men: the narrowing range of superhero emotions
There’s more to hero life than ‘scared’ and ‘angry’
Critics agree that X-Men: Apocalypse is a troubled film. They just don’t entirely agree on the core issue. The Week says it has a villain problem. Indiewire says it has an apocalypse problem. The Hollywood Reporter says it has “severe traffic control problems.” All these things are true — it’s overcrowded, the villain is generic and forgettable, and his plan to Destroy Everything Because Reasons has turned up in far too many recent superhero films.
But none of this would entirely matter if Apocalypse’s heroes were personable, believable people who made the film’s stakes feel meaningful and specific. They certainly should be: They’re X-Men, some of the most pointedly diverse, backstory-rich heroes in the comic-book landscape. They come from different countries, cultures, and circumstances. They cover a wide variety of ages, interests, and educational levels. They should be a fractious group of distinctive individuals, struggling to come together to face a common threat.
Instead, in Apocalypse, the X-Men and the villains they face are all cut from the exact same emotional cloth. They deliver dead-eyed, monotonal speeches about their traumas and their plans for the future. They stand around in poster-ready formation, glowering with their best catwalk-fierce supermodel expressions. And even when some of them are blue and one is bald and one is black and one is blindfolded, they all end up looking pretty much the same.
Lack of emotional range has been a problem in superhero movies for the past decade, and 2016 seems like a watershed year. It started with the grimmest and grittiest comic-book movie of the decade (Batman v Superman) facing off against the silliest one (Deadpool), and then Captain America: Civil War took the normally emotionally rich Marvel Cinematic Universe to a particularly dark and deadened place. Even the MCU’s most complicated heroes, developed over the course of half a dozen films, become raging, silent punch-bots by the end of Civil War. That’s a meaningful emotional tragedy within the isolated context of the film itself. But watching all these movies together, it’s easy to wonder: don’t heroes ever get to feel joy anymore? X-Men: Apocalypse
If Batman Begins really is ground zero for our heroes being replaced by grimaces, it’s possible to lay some of the blame there. Batman is defined by his barely varying rage — there’s a funny little fan-art concept about that floating around the internet in a wide variety of iterations — and Batman Begins established a particularly grave, ponderous tone. But even before that film, there was Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine in the X-movies, setting a standard for superheroes in 2000’s X-Men with his peacetime glower and his wartime snarl. Superman Returns emphasized Superman’s alienness and his remove from human feeling. Ang Lee’s Hulk marinated in the big green guy’s angst and anger without finding any of the childish glee in Hulk smashing things. Or maybe it all goes back even further, to 1994’s The Crow, and the way it turned superheroism into one long session of goth seething and brooding. Part of the appeal of MCU films like Iron Man and Guardians Of The Galaxy was that they felt like a corrective to years of hero movies that took all the fun out of heroing. They let their protagonists escape the long national funk that’s become as standard-issue for heroes as leather costumes and big explosions.
It’s certainly understandable that our cultural mandate has gravitated toward gravity. Endless thinkpieces have been written about how the current superhero-movie boom comes from America’s attempt to process the September 11th, 2001 attacks, visually and emotionally, and to simplify them into something that can be punched in the face. It took a while for movies to catch up with the grim-n-gritty trend that took over superhero comics in the 1980s, but now they seem to be trying to out-dark the comics that spawned them. So many comics-movie protagonists have taken on an edge of weary desperation, as if they’re trying to reflect the way the viewers feel about living in an age of government surveillance, endless foreign conflict, and seemingly insoluble problems.
“Don’t heroes get to feel joy anymore?”
But taking a subject seriously isn’t the same thing as taking it without a hint of emotion. The problem isn’t characters defined by anger or frustration, the problem is when they don’t seem to feel anything else. In X-Men: Apocalypse, virtually everyone in the cast is emotionally shattered by traumas on-screen and off, from deaths in the family to the overall state of mutant rights. Nightcrawler, Mystique, Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Magneto all walk through the movie in various states of terror and leaden despair, carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. Other characters,like Angel, Storm, and especially Psylocke, are so busy scowling that they barely get to talk. X-Men: Apocalypse
This is a problem for the fans. The entire point of a character like Angel / Archangel is the arc between who he was at the beginning and what he became, and when he’s a gloomy, almost wordless thug throughout the entire process, he becomes an empty special effect, without any narrative power. The homogeneity is also a problem for the storytelling: characters who start a story at an emotional dead end, already furious or numb with shock, have nowhere to go as the filmmakers attempt to ramp up the dramatic stakes. And it’s a problem for the audience. If superheroes are meant to represent our best selves, our most brave and altruistic impulses, what does it say about us if we expect our best selves to be grimly emotionless robots?
There’s a clear feeling in modern superhero films that showing too much “soft” emotion somehow weakens a character. The Batman of DC Comics is sometimes capable of laughter — remember the final page of The Killing Joke? — but the recent on-screen versions can barely crack a sardonic smirk, even in Bruce Wayne mode. Henry Cavill’s version of Superman looks perpetually pinched with some sort of deep inner strain. The X-movies have almost universally been dour, sometimes to operatic ends, and sometimes just to depressing ones. Even quip-happy, smart-ass Tony Stark loses his ability to banter by the end of Civil War, and openly sets out to kill two men in a wave of blank-faced hatred.
“Characters who start at an emotional dead end have nowhere to go”
There are so many signs that the “bigger, meaner, darker, angrier” trend isn’t actually what audiences want. Every big superhero-movie-defining callout moment from the past several years has come when the script set aside emotional deadness for a moment. Audiences seem to celebrate any hint that their heroes are human. Quicksilver glorying in his powers in his high-speed action scene in X-Men: Days Of Future Past, Star-Lord’s swaggering little dance to “Come And Get Your Love” at the beginning of Guardians Of The Galaxy, Wade and Vanessa’s lusty sex montage in Deadpool, Ant-Man thrilling to his own sudden power as a giant in Civil War, Spider-Man’s entire Civil War character — these are the moments that become fan memes and critical reference points, because they show the cracks in the heroes’ dull armor.
And that’s because heroes aren’t just escapist, and aren’t just exciting. They’re aspirational. We’re meant to identify with them, and to root for them, and to care about them. We’re meant to want to be them. But it’s hard to identify with a mirthless, expressionless chunk of granite. So many grimdark modern superheroes offer a fantasy of being tough enough to survive any trauma, not just physically, but emotionally. To people who feel battered by the world, for whatever reason, that Wolverine glare that says “I can beat whatever you can throw at me” can be inspiring and relieving. It’s a fantasy not just of competence, but of indestructibility. As we collectively continue trying to process the constant political, social, and technological changes in the world, and the feelings of frustration and helplessness that sometimes comes with them, it’s comforting to retreat to a fantasy of being able to deal with whatever comes.
But it’s also comforting to imagine being indestructible, and still getting to share in the full range of human experience — lust and love, delight and wonder, joy and amusement, and all the other things lacking in Apocalypse and so many other superhero movies. Our collective fantasies define superheroes, and we collectively fantasize about more than one thing. By shutting out so much of the range of human life, hero movies are making superhumans considerably less than human. It makes their characters duller. It turns their movies into unvarying slogs. It limits the ways in which these films can speak to us, and engage us. It’s true that too many superhero films are setting out to crowd in more action, and bigger stakes, at the expense of any kind of variety or creativity. But the small emotional apocalypse feels more disastrous than the big CGI ones. It’s important that our heroes come along to save the day. It’s just as important that they preserve their humanity in the process.
It’s the end of the world as we know it in “X-Men: Apocalypse”, starring younger versions of characters we first met in the movie “X-Men” way back in 2000.
Timeline-wise, the current run of prequels is getting close to meeting in the middle with the older films. So (with spoilers) let’s see if the events of “Apocalypse” manage to tie together with what has gone before — or has the new flick messed up the continuity?
As a reminder, here’s the chronology:
1962: “X-Men: First Class” (2011)
1972: “X-Men: Days of Future Past” (2014)
1983: “X-Men: Apocalypse” (2016)
The not too distant future: “X-Men” (2000)
The not too distant future: “X2” (2003)
The not too distant future: “X-Men: The Last Stand” (2006)
If there are discrepancies between new and old films, it could be explained away by the new timeline created in the time-traveling “Days of Future Past”, but I hate it when they do that — I’m looking at you, J.J. Abrams and your “Star Trek” reboot. So leaving aside any timey-wimey nonsense, do the films still tie together?
The answer is yes…and no.
Yes…
In “Apocalypse”, some of the young X-Men encounter Wolverine and free him from the Weapon X project where he has been turned into a living weapon. Hang on — I thought, as I was watching — don’t they meet for the first time in “X-Men”?
The X-Men met Wolverine for the first time in 2000 — or so it seemed.
20th Century-Fox/Getty Images
It seemed that way at the time, but watching “X-Men” again, there’s actually some ambiguity. In the 2000 movie, Wolverine, who has no memory of his past, is introduced to Jean Grey and Cyclops apparently for the first time. But they never actually ask him his name or seek any information from him. Wolverine doesn’t remember them — “What do they call you? Wheels?” — but they never show any sign that they don’t know him. At the time we assumed this was because Professor Xavier and Jean could read his mind, but it could easily be because they had already crossed paths years before.
Then in “X2”, a conversation between Magneto and Professor Xavier implies that both of them know more about Wolverine’s past than they’re telling him. That matches up with “Apocalypse” too.
Also in “X2”, Stryker meets Wolverine for the first time in what he says is about “15 years”. Given that “X-Men” was set in the “not too distant future”, “X2” is probably more like 20-25 years after Wolverine escaped Stryker’s Weapon X project in 1983. Eh, close enough — Stryker may have got his dates wrong in the heat of the moment, or, more likely, this reference will retroactively make sense if the two encounter each other in the next X-Men movie, which will be set in the ’90s.
Maybe we’ll also see Stryker’s son Jason in that forthcoming film. Incidentally, the actor playing Jason in “X2”, Michael Reid MacKay, was 50 years old at the time, which definitely doesn’t fit the timeline — leading us into the ways that the films contradict each other.
…and no
According to “Apocalypse”, Jean, Cyclops and Mystique have been to Alkali Lake, the home of the Weapon X project. That seems to contradict “X2”, in which they don’t recognise the location of the base.
More significantly, in “Apocalypse”, the mutant Nightcrawler fights alongside Jean Grey, Cyclops and Mystique. That directly contradicts “X2”, in which the X-Men very differently meet Nightcrawler for the first time.
Jean Grey and Nightcrawler hang out in “Apocalypse”, contradicting “X2”.
Alan Markfield
There’s no ambiguity, as there is with Wolverine: Storm and Cyclops straight-out ask Nightcrawler his name, and Nightcrawler asks them about the school, with no recognition on either side.
And finally…
So what about “X-Men: The Last Stand”? The third “X-Men” movie, released in 2006, shows Xavier and Magneto as friends, meeting a young Jean Grey just 20 years ago, which is way off the chronology established in more recent films. It also features a winged mutant and a man called Trask, but technically they could be different people than the winged mutant in “Apocalypse” and the character Bolivar Trask played by Peter Dinklage in “Days of Future Past”.
Still, we can probably go ahead and forget about “The Last Stand” anyway, since “Days of Future Past” seems to write it off — and “Apocalypse” makes director Brian Singer’s feelings about the third film pretty clear…
Installing Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi means you’ll find Minecraft Pi in the Games section. Minecraft Pi is a bare-bones version of the popular survival game designed to help teach users various programming languages.
Sure, it’s fun, but it’s not the Minecraft game we’ve come to know and love. As with all things Raspberry Pi, a group of users have figured out how to install the full version of Minecraft on your Raspberry Pi 2 or 3.
As with all things Raspberry Pi, there’s a lot of editing and tinkering with files and Terminal commands. Just be sure to take your time, read through each step and you should be fine.
Keep in mind
Before you dive in, there’s some things you should know:
You will need to know your Mojang account log-in info, along with your Minecraft username.
Naturally, you’ll need a paid license for Minecraft. You can purchase one from Minecraft.net
The guide is specific to Minecraft 1.8.9. However, with a simple tweak you can run the latest version, currently 1.9.4 (more on this below).
Running Minecraft on a $35 computer isn’t going to be the smoothest experience, but it’s definitely playable.
Plan on spending an hour getting everything up and running.
Raspbian Terminal window on the left, Minecraft installation guide on the right.
Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNET
I suggest opening this guide in your Raspberry Pi’s browser, with a Terminal window next to it. There are some altered log files stored in Dropbox accounts you’ll need to download, and I’d hate to post the commands here, only to have the links changed at a later day.
The process is simple, mostly requiring you to copy various Terminal commands from the browser, pasting them into the command line. After pasting each command in, press enter on the keyboard and your Pi takes care of the rest.
Tips to make the process as smooth as possible
Here are some tips I came up with to make the process go as smooth as possible:
Step 1 does not apply to Raspberry Pi 3 users. Currently you cannot overclock the Pi 3. Besides, the Pi 3 is actually faster out of the box than the suggested overclock speed of the Pi 2.
After entering Step 4’s command, use the arrow keys on your keyboard to highlight Advanced options and press enter. Next, highlight GL Options, select Enable.
I got a bit confused by Step 7 of the guide where it says to click on “edit profile,” You actually need to click on Profile Editor, then double-click on the first (and only) listing. Under Version Selection click on the drop-down next to Use version and select a build number. Keep in mind, the guide defaults to 1.8.9. For now, use that version and then we can change it after everything is working.
Step 10 tells you to edit the “run.sh” file, without any further instructions. To do this, open the Minecraft folder located in your Pi directory and right-click on the run.sh file, then select Text Editor.
To launch Minecraft, you have a two different options. The guide will tell you to use “./run.sh” in Terminal to launch Minecraft. While that works, before entering the command you’ll need to enter “cd Minecraft” into a Terminal window. The other option is to open the Minecraft folder, double-click on the run.sh file and select “Execute.”
Run the latest version
Alright, so once you get everything up and running, you can start tinkering with the installation. In order to jump to the latest version of Minecraft, you’ll need to relaunch the Minecraft.jar file.
In a Terminal window, enter: cd Minecraft
Next, enter: java -jar Minecraft.jar
Click on Profile Editor then change the version to 1.9.4 (or whatever the latest version is).
Save your change and click on the Play button, forcing Minecraft to download the latest version.
Next, open the Minecraft folder.
In order to eliminate any headaches should you make a mistake, take two-seconds and make a copy of the run.sh file. Rename it to something alone the lines of “runcopy.sh”.
With a copy safely tucked away, open the run.sh file by right-clicking on it and selecting Text Editor.
Press Ctrl-F on your keyboard, and enter 1.8.9 in the text field. There should be two — and only two — instances found. Replace each one with the current version of Minecraft (this should be the same version number you selected in step 3).
