Assassin's Creed - Why Can't We Have Nice Things?

It really sucks that we don't have any good movies based on video games. It's been about forty years since the medium was born and every attempt to bring it to the silver screen has been guilty pleasures at best and downright unwatchable at worst. Hell, we've had three video game adaptations this year and none of them were really any good. (Well, The Angry Birds Movie and Warcraft weren't at least. I didn't even bother seeing Ratchet & Clank, but let's be honest, neither did you.) I think a major problem they all share is that the writers were tasked with adapting a story from an interactive medium to a passive one, but even then there is still a plethora of stories in gaming that are pretty hard to mess up. And with Ubisoft, one of the biggest game developers in the world, forming its own movie studio with the intent of bringing some of its biggest IP to the silver screen, we might have a good video game movie in our future. Granted, Ubisoft is one of the kings of horrible business decisions, so my optimism should be taken with a grain of salt. But the Assassin's Creed series has a deep lore that can make for an interesting movie, and it's got some legitimately talented people working on it. So how does Assassin's Creed hold up as the studio's cinematic debut? Can it rise to the challenge and break the curse?

Short answer: no. Not even close.

Now first off, I should put my cards on the table: I've never played any of the Assassin's Creed games. The most experience I have with the series is watching someone else play one of them at college and a smattering of YouTube videos, most of which were showing off its numerous bugs and glitches, but I've been able to absorb some of the basics through cultural osmosis, and even then my understanding is rudimentary at best. That said, it's still painfully obvious that the plot suffers from the same pains of failed game adaptations of the past. One of the biggest struggles of bringing video games to the big screen is that unlike books or plays, games are an interactive medium. When you watch a movie, you're along for the ride. When you're playing a video game, you're behind the wheel. Take that interactive factor out of the equation, and you strip away the core engagement. Assassin's Creed feels like watching someone play all the boring parts of the game while skipping important parts that keep the story together.

Our story follows Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender), a death row inmate who is rescued by a modern day version of the Knights Templar, who have created a machine called the Animus that can read a person's genetic memory and let them see the experiences of their ancestors. Callum is the descendant of Aguilar de Nerha (also Fassbender), a member of an ancient order of assassins plainly called the Assassins, who 500 years ago stole a long lost artifact that the Templars had acquired that would've somehow helped them eradicate all free will and violence. Through these memories, the overseers of this experiment including the Animus' inventor (Marion Cotillard) and her father (Jeremy Irons) hope to find where Aguilar hid this MacGuffin and carry our their plans.

There are many, many, many problems with this movie, but the biggest one has to be the script. This isn't so much a story as it is a repeating cycle of things that happen. Michael Fassbender gets plugged into the Animus, we see memories of his ancestor on some kind of mission in 15^th century Spain, there's a fight scene, he's pulled from the machine, he starts having hallucinations of his ancestor, he and Marion Cotillard talk about the war between the Assassins and the Templars, he talks to other Assassin descendants who are planning a revolt, there's some stuff about him wanting to kill his father after he killed his mother, Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Irons argue about the ethics of what they're doing and if it's really worth it, Fassbender is plugged back into the machine, rinse and repeat. There's barely a story arc, the characters are all flat and one-dimensional, and the actors are desperately trying to make the most out of some awful dialogue that not even Daniel Day Lewis could make work.

Aguilar's parts are easily the most interesting. There are a few cool, albiet sloppily edited action sequences of him and the other Assassins scaling walls, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, dropping from great heights and ambushing enemies from above, but they only take up about a third of the movie and the scientists rip him (and us) from the experience when they get all the information they need. Which is a shame because those parts are what made the game so popular. There's a reason that Desmond Miles never appears on the box art; nobody plays Assassin's Creed for him. They play it explore places in the distant past, to quietly pull the strings of history, to interact with historical figures (we do get brief appearances from Torquemada and Christopher Columbus, but they're only cameos), or to see what glitches were left behind in Ubisoft's hasty attempt to get the game out before Christmas. It would be like making an adaptation of Les Miserables where the main focus was on Victor Hugo's political ramblings.

And you know what the worst part is? This movie squandered a lot of promise. And I'm not just talking about my hopes for a good video game movie. Like I said, the Assassin's Creed franchise has an interesting premise that could make for a decent movie, and there's a lot of talented people working on it. I've already mentioned the cast, but director Justin Kurzel, whose previous film was an adaptation of Macbeth which also starred Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, has a unique style somewhere between Gore Verbinski and Zack Snyder that could've added a lot of personality to this movie, but it's all undercut by the half-baked script, the shoddy editing, the drab cinematography, or whatever shenanigans were going on behind the scene. Or maybe this whole thing was just a tax write-off that he's getting out of the way so he can get bigger projects off the ground, and my expectations for this thing were too high. But still, you have all the ingredients to make something worthwhile, and this the best can come up with? Come on, people, you're better than that.

Overall, Assassin's Creed is a hollow piece of wasted potential, a bog standard slog of a January movie that somehow muscled its way into the Christmas season on the name power of its cast and IP alone. It's not even enjoyable. It's not so bad it's good like Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, it's not pants-on-head crazy like Postal, it's not even trying to make the most of what it has like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. It's just a complete wast of time. One of these days we'll get a good video game movie, but sadly, this is not that day. But considering that Ubisoft had a hand in making this, I should just be glad that movie doesn't come with micro-transactions, or that the actors' faces aren't half missing.

It could always be worse.

 4/10