#439: Assassin’s Creed (the movie)
An original story in the Assassinverse — but it’s hard to say who it’s for
Initial release: 2016
Director: Justin Kurzel
Without getting into a discussion about quality, it’s safe to say that video game movies are a bit of an odd lot. Either you get a loose adaptation (Silent Hill, House of the Dead, Mortal Kombat) that tries to retell the game’s story (usually, but not always, the first game in a successful franchise with elements from later entries) or it’s something that uses the basic concept and characters but is otherwise an absolute goddamn fever dream (Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, Postal — though, that last one is at least 1:1 with the tone of the source material.) Less common are the films that strive to take their place in canon, such as the animated Resident Evil films (as opposed to the live action ones which fall squarely in the “fever dream” category.)
What makes Justin Kurzel’s live-action Assassin’s Creed film so unusual is that it’s, to my knowledge, the only big budget, actually-shown-in-theatres video game movie that is neither an adaptation nor a self-contained story, but an original story set in the established universe of its source material. In short: Cal Lynch (Michael Fassbender) is a convicted killer sentenced to die… only to find himself a guinea pig in an experiment to access the memories of Aguilar, a distant ancestor who lived in 15th century Spain. The goal of the experiment is to find the location of a lost artifact known as the Apple of Eden, which — it’s not subtly hinted — is capable of controlling peoples’ minds. While they could have just gone with a straightforward adaptation of the first game — indeed, the premise is more or less the same, but with very different characters and a very different historical setting — they instead chose to make an original story, one with ties to later games (we catch a glimpse of the protagonist of Assassin’s Creed Unity, even.) It’s a good idea, actually — create a story that would fit in the Assassin’s Creed multimedia universe (since that seems to be all the rage these days, ever since Blair Witch Project popularized it back in the late 90s) to attract both fans and outsiders alike.
But it’s a double-edged wristblade, unfortunately. Right away from the start we can see the fundamental problem in trying to introduce the core premise to a new audience, with a lengthy text crawl establishing the ancient conflict between Assassins and Templars. I don’t think you can really get away with this kind of thing unless you’re making a Star Wars movie or a Blade Runner film, the former because it’s what’s expected and the latter because there’s a 35-year span between the first and second films, gotta get people up to speed somehow.
The next problem is, and this one is easily spotted if you’d just completed Assassin’s Creed II like I did, the game plays a little fast and loose with canon. (Nerd details, skip if you don’t care: Despite Assassin’s Creed II revealing that Altaïr long ago had gotten rid of the Brotherhood’s penchant for rituals, in particular the severing of a finger, we see that very same ritual return in 15th century Spain. It’s never made clear whether this is an outright continuity error or if the Spanish sect of the Brotherhood just never abandoned the ritual. There’s also the fact that Desmond Miles — and the obvious lessons Abstergo would have learned from dealing with him — are a non-factor in this, resulting in Abstergo making several rookie security mistakes in a row which ultimately come back to bite them in the ass. And lastly, while we know that there’s more than one Apple of Eden, the film doesn’t bother explaining this fact, making it seem more unique. And I’m not even going to get into the weirdness that is the Animus.) For a film that was conceived around trying to fit into an established universe, these issues with canon might be considered serious flaws, especially given the franchise was nine years and eight games in at that point.
So who is this film even for? Well, if you like Michael Fassbender, he’s all over it. So’s Jeremy Irons and Marion Cotillard. Irons, especially, elevates any film he’s in, even if his character isn’t given a lot of room to breathe. Fassbender embodies the Ubisoft Main Character to a T, which isn’t as much of an acting achievement as you’d think, but it’s better than nothing. And Marion Cotillard doesn’t seem to know what she wants her character to be, but I think that’s in part due to the script having no idea where the character stands on the whole “mind control the world” thing, making her villainous turn in the film’s closing minutes seem a little out of left field… but if she had gone the other way it would have been even more jarring.
What the film lacks in plot it makes up for in being visually stunning, shot on location in various places around Spain, making for a hot, dusty world that the historical characters live in; some might say too dusty, as it seems like these characters exist in a permanent tan fog. It makes for some cool visuals when we watch Fassbender bounce around in the Animus, holographic scenery creating a sort of force-feedback Thunderdome in stark contrast to the VR chairs used in the games. (Okay, I guess I’m getting into the weirdness that is this film’s take on the Animus after all: while I can guess why Kurzel chose to do it this way, it’s almost as if the filmmakers have forgotten that The Matrix, one of the most famous and popular films about virtual reality ever, had a pretty clear split between the real world and the titular Matrix.)
The film ends with a lot of loose ends; while a further two films were planned to form a trilogy, that’s probably never going to happen following the first film’s box office failure and 20th Century Fox being acquired by Disney. It’s just as well: while it’s a fun film, it’s also just kinda dumb? I don’t know why they made this. Well, no, I know why, I just don’t understand why they chose to do it this way. Some things were just meant to be mysteries, I suppose. Like the mystery of making Christopher Columbus “a friend of the Assassins,” as if that murderous colonizer could ever be anything but a Templar, in the next six chapters of this review I will-
