Assassin's Creed

While I didn't a whole lot about the Warcraft games and was going in as a general movie going audience, I actually know a pretty good deal about the Assassin's Creed games. Now I have been detached from the games for the past few years because I became uninterested with the story and the games became repetitive for me, but I was still interested in the movie and wanted to see it to see if that video game glass ceiling could finally be broken.

Unfortunately it doesn't take too long for Assassin's Creed to go down the wrong path.

My first issue with this movie is really with the first paragraph text that rolls in front of the audience. I'm paraphrasing of course, but it basically says that for years the Knights Templar have been looking for the Apple of Eden in order to purge human free will and rid the world of violence. And the only people to stand in their way is the brotherhood of Assassins.

Now you may be thinking, this works out well because it establishes the Templars as bad and the Assassins as good, what's the problem? Well I'll come back to this problem in a second.

The movie then introduces us to Callum Lynch (played by Michael Fassbender). He is a death row inmate who is perceived dead when he gets lethal injection but instead is brought to a secret corporation called Abstergo and is told by a woman named Sophie (played by Marion Cotillard) that they need his help to go into a machine called the Animus and access the memories of his ancestors and find the Apple of Eden. Very quickly the audience realizes that Abstergo is a Templar organization and it's being headed by a Templar by the name of Alan Rikkin (played by Jeremy Irons). They need to convince Callum to help them access the memories of his Assassin ancestor Aguilar (also played by Fassbender) back during the Spanish Inquisition and find the location of the Apple of Eden.

Now Callum doesn't know that Jeremy Irons wants to use the Apple to eradicate free will but the audience does. Are you starting to see the problem with this film from the get go? The audience is aware that Callum is being taken for a ride this entire time and he doesn't and there's not really any suspense.

This movie is basically taking the plot from the first game and adapting it into a movie. In the first game, you played Desmond, a guy who has Assassin heritage but isn't an Assassin himself. When you're brought to Abstergo, it's kept very vague on who you're going into the animus for and even when you figure it all out, it's still kind of left vague on which faction is actually the good guys and which ones are the bad guys. The movie actually has an easier job to do to keep the audience in suspense and maybe make you question which side is good.

There are actually some decent human moments between Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Irons that could be perceived as character developing and making you believe that they could be the good guys. But from the very beginning you know Jeremy Irons is bad, you know that Abstergo is bad so there's no suspense and so all the scenes set in the modern times are really boring.

The highlights of the film are really when Callum is in the animus and you see the events happening in 1492 with his ancestor Aguilar. The problem? He only goes back 3 times. Each time he does, it feels like you're watching him play a quick video game demo and then he gets pulled out pretty abruptly at a really random point. And the worst part is, I was more intrigued by the story being told back in 1492. I was more interested in Aguilar that I was in Callum and if this entire movie had been set in 1492 it probably would have been a better film. The parts in the past is why people played Assassin's Creed and it's the reason people were interested in the story at all. Sure I always thought an Assassin's Creed could have been set in modern times, but the past portions were clearly more interesting and that carries over into the movie.

Now because they didn't focus on the story in 1492 the characters of Aguilar and his Assassin partner (played by Ariane Labed) aren't really that developed. But they're almost about as developed as someone would be in a short film. I feel like in the future, someone should cut out all the modern times and just put out a short film focusing on Aguilar. And while the characters were underdeveloped, the action was definitely the parts that got me going and they were well choreographed and executed.

The problem with the action however was that these sequences were always peppered with them flashing back to Callum in the animus miming the action while Aguilar would be actually doing it. I just wanted to shout at the screen, just stay in the past! It is something that you definitely have to adjust to and it would have made the fights more seamless and probably a little more epic if they had just shown more the past. And that's kind of the biggest issue with the whole movie.

I will give the movie credit. It was more accessible to a larger audience than Warcraft was because that's just the nature of the Assassin's Creed lore. It's got a mixture of The DaVinci Code and Time travel to it that is just more interesting. You don't need to have played the game to enjoy the intrigue of the story and this is an example of how Assassin's Creed could have pulled more, stylistically from the game. The amount of lore and fan service was enough that, being a casual gamer didn't even notice but my friend who had played them all knew exactly what was going on. There seemed to be enough fan service hidden so that people like him could find it, but the rest of the movie was accessible for everyone and nobody should be getting confused in this film.

The biggest issues with the film is just it's inability to hide anything from the audience and the fact that the movie didn't focus more on Aguilar and the 1492 story line. There's inklings of a good movie within Assassin's Creed and I think overall, it probably had the better source material to make a good video game movie than Warcraft did, but the execution just wasn't there.

I wouldn't mind seeing a sequel to this film. As opposed to Warcraft where I was pretty indifferent and would only really want to see a sequel if it meant that it would get other studios to be more comfortable with making video game movies that have a better story, I would actually like to see a sequel to this film. I thought the characters were interesting enough and the premise, while it was a little bit boring in this film, could be made into something bigger in the future.

Sequels are in doubt I'm afraid.

Overall, Assassin's Creed is a better film than I think most critics will say it is. It is by no means a good film, it has a lot of problems with the way it's executed and it is a little bit of a snoozer at times, but if you are a fan of the Assassin's Creed lore and you always wanted to see it on screen, this will be... sort of that? I enjoyed the film for what it was and it wet my appetite for something more. Now I don't expect to get more because you usually don't get second chances with movies like this. And that's it, we just didn't get a good video game movie this year.

Which is a shame. There's a lot of good ideas that come from video games. I think the reason that video games had such a spike in popularity wasn't just the increase in technology and the expanded game play, but also because the stories got better. You look at video games like Bioshock, The Last of Us, and Mass Effect and you see the potential for some really great stories to be put on the big screen. But the same way stage musicals or books have to be adapted for film because they are different mediums, video game movies need to be adapted as well. And as long as we keep dealing out mediocre adaptations, we're never going to get the stories we deserve.

But what do you think? Have you seen Assassin's Creed? Which one was better, Assassin's Creed or Warcraft? What do you think should be the next film we get excited for that will finally make video game movies viable? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

I'll leave you with this. I think the part that got people the most excited about Assassin's Creed was the parkour and the fun gameplay mechanics of traveling on rooftops and evading capture. Here's that in real life, it's kind of fun. Enjoy!