Assassin's Creed - D

Quick Hit: Game Over.

The history of failed video game movies has been discussed ad nauseum throughout the internet film community. I’m not going to add onto that discussion more than is necessary, besides to say that I think this movie adds to that heap. What I don’t understand is how this happened. There is a terrific story in these games – one that I’m a huge fan of. In fact, there are multiple awesome stories throughout the franchise. Couple that with the fact that there are two solid actors in Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, and you should have had an amazing story that dove into the depth of the stories in the games.

Instead… well, we ended up with something that sort of resembled the games, but was actually really boring. And we’re talking about someone that has their mind transported into the body of their ancestor in order to live out their memories via science. HOW CAN THAT BE BORING?

I know how, because this movie did it. The movie focused on the most boring part of the games (at least the early ones) – the Animus and Abstergo industries and made them the main focus of the game. They also pulled a lot of the interesting parts of going back into your ancestor out, and the story seemed nonsensical and confusing once we actually were able to see the memories. Part of that had to do with the way the Animus was interpreted in this film – which isn’t to say I don’t understand why, because audiences aren’t really paying to watch Michael Fassbender lie on a bed. But the back and forth action, while at times cool, was rendered boring after seeing it enough.

The one thing I will give is that Fassbender does a great job in the memories. I could really take him or leave him as Callum, but when he is actively acting as Aguilar, he is terrific. He makes some of the action scenes worthwhile, and I was pleasantly surprised with Ariane Labed as well. It just shows that if you focused on the right portions of the movie, you could have completely changed the feel of it for the better. I especially liked the fact that here the music was toned differently than back at Abstergo. It added to the different feel of it, despite it often times seeming generic.

I hope that this doesn’t discourage from more attempts at this series. As I stated in the opening paragraph, there is a really great story there for the right writer/director team. But this version only can get a “D” from me.

For more on this movie check out IMDB.