This movie, is slow and incredibly low budget. Now this is not a deterrent as many low budget movies can be good fun to both laugh at an laugh with but this one is meant to be in a much more serious tone. The world set to be a grim dark and brutal reality, which to the movies credit is show very well in the opening scene. However, beyond that point the illusion of an grand and epic adventure is lost, instead replaced with a lot of exposition, and lore-ish dumping (not quite fitting with explanations/needed information as it's rarely brought up again if at all). Again to its credit, this movie does its exposition and world imagery in a much more tasteful way than many of the modern Disney, Amazon, Marvel, DC, and other "awakened" Culture-baiting companies.

This is still not a solid positive though as despite it feeling slow the dialogue of the world is often delivered quickly by one character and responses from others are much like early video games with extremely extended pauses in dialogue at some points.

The things you will notice are;

1: The visual effects and incredibly simple, to the point where you can see the bubbles in the foam armour, even the labels of the foam brand, and brush strokes that are not hidden by the film filters. The weapons are highly unwieldy, such as bone weapons for the guard/King's guard, yet the armour is meant to be metal. So why they have bone/ primitive weapons is because they have limited weapons and must know how to use what is available, but if they have the materials to make incredibly thick armour, why not thin it to save materials or make superior weapons? The lack of helmets, chainmail and proper protection also breaks the immersive experience. The reason, I assume is they were unsure of how to convey emotion without the face, much like a lot of "new" media these days.

2: you can easily tell who are main characters are whether they are enemies or heroes, as they have far more time put into their costumes, even the sound design shows this. The main enemies look far more interesting (though basic) than the heroes.

3: the CGI effects are horrible, some I swear are stolen from low-budget games or trailers of higher-end games.

The moments when the green screen is used its almost laughable with how they tried to polish out the poorly chosen backgrounds and bad light matching with a fuzzy grain and high brightness.

4: the editing and audio, a lot of the dialogue in the movie feels it should have been longer but was clearly cut shorter, mid-sentence or mid-way through a word. The sound design becomes like sandpaper to the ears and smoke to the eyes when the enemy noises (as they do not speak English or have subtitles) are not lip-synced properly.

5: there is very little hope in understanding the side of the Orcs, as you have a snowball's chance in a lava pit in a hell of understanding them. Emotional scenes and a shift in dialogue that could have been added to the movie are just empty fillers now. Even later in the movie when you see their side of events.

6: the acting is ok, some actors are far better than others and can make or break some of the interactions. This affects the times jumps as well.

7: the way the plot is shown (I should have put this earlier but I won't change it now) is almost entirely in dialogue, the flashbacks are the same, and the only time this is broken is by turning the rare moments of combat, in which the main characters are eerily silent.

8: the writing is both strong and weak, it's almost hard to explain. There are some scenes where the writing is strong, even compelling when in the right mood, but in the eand there are other moments where it's so weak it makes the fragility of silence look like a diamond. The foreshadowing is surprisingly subtly superb.

9: final point, the combat choreography is sad, the camera moves way too much in the scenes, and the actors struggle to use some of the weapons.

My final thoughts. If you enjoy movies like "Run Away Jury", "12 Angry Men", Breakfast Club", and so on, you will appreciate the dialogue-focused plot, but you may not enjoy the C movie quality visuals.

It's sad that so there are so many amazing ideas that weren't able to come to fruition, like a Dnd game run by a forgetful DM flying by the seed of their pants. Much like such a DM, this leads to disappointment as so many cool and interesting creatures are mentioned but never shown. The dialogue even shows this as a lot of the "inspirational" quotes or lines as not so cleverly stolen from other media or from actually inspiring sayings, although in this movie they are delivered poorly. An example of this is the tale of "The Frog and the Scorpion" which has been changed to instead be "The Frog and the Baby Wyvren", the reason to which is not clear as the original would have worked perfectly fine. Sometimes these are surrounded by pointless bits of dialogue as well. Lots of cliches.

I won't not lie after a while I found myself routing for the orcs just because their moments of combat though poorly done were still far better than that of the humans and plague bearers. I will say however the Orc music is near the end is top-notch hit for the few seconds it plays. Also only one orc speaks English.

The betrayal and then double betrayal is predictable and like a few before me have commented before me have mentioned the chchcharacters once you realize what they are like everything they do or say becomes decently predictable. Despite the serious tone random bits of kinda humour are tossed in that don't fit in with the movie as a whole. Another note, the name is Warchief but it has almost nothing to do with the war chief till the end and even there it feels like an afterthought, where the plots and ideas get confused.

Watch it if you are bored while doing a task, as honestly it would have worked better as an audio drama. Not worth buying but if you can find a free stream give it a go if you liked the examples I gave, keep low expectations though. I gave it a 3/10 because it gave me ideas I can use for writing and games but that may be more on me than the movie itself.

Call it fan fiction or one off adventure, Warchief is made for fans. It does much with little. It is unapologeticly dedicated to its genre, a pure fantasy of action and magic. A role playing game come to life on the screen. Every scene is a labor of love and Warchief has a charm for that. Of particular note are the scenes played in Orcish, and there are many. I don't know if there were subtitles for these, but if there were, the version I saw didn't have them. Instead I got the creepy feeling of being an outsider looking into an impenetrable culture. The actors inhabit their roles. My biggest complaint is the overuse of smoke in the final scenes.

Love that it doesn't try to be all things to all people.

If you're a fan of fantasy, this one is a fun diversion.

The overall production values were better than I expected for this film and while I could tell right away that it was a lower budget film, it had a lot going for it. For one thing, the plot development is present in this film. It's actually ambitious and while it fails to fully deliver on its promise at times, it came across as if someone actually tried to put a real story together and tell it.

I noticed that the film actually employed a linguist in the crew and it shows in the speech of the orcs. The makeup was also better than I expected as well. Overall, I found the acting to be pretty good; granted no one is going to take home an Oscar, but still decent.

The main protagonist is someone who you actually care about and while others have mentioned flashbacks to his backstory being boring, I found it to help make me care what happened to him. There are also some plot points that don't really come together and the mythos of the setting is sometimes hard to follow. In spite of the imperfect execution of these things, it was a good effort and the bones of the setting are present if you pay attention and not just looking for the next blood splatter.

I'm glad I watched the film and I do hope that there is a sequel to it. If you enjoy a pretty decent fantasy adventure, this may be a movie you will like. It is not perfect, but it's one of the better endeavors out there by small filmmakers.