For those who are fans of film, as well as the video games we all know that it is almost impossible to have an amazing video game to film adaptation. Video games are often given the chance to have the time to work more with the story and characters, when movies, at most, have two and half hours to hold an audience’s attention. Some come out tolerable such as the first "Silent Hill" movie, that can bring you vaguely back to the feeling the game made you feel, while not being quite what you want. Then there are ones like "Silent Hill 2" and "Super Mario Bros" that are just flat, horrible, bad and causes fans of the games to cringe.
One of my personal favorite video game series is the "Assassin's Creed" Series made by Ubisoft, where you play a character whom goes into a machine where you can relive the memories of your ancestors though the power of SCIENCE! (The games do kind of explain how this works, but best not get into it). So in each game you are playing through a different ancestor’s life. You can go from an assassin during the Crusades to a Pirate traveling the seas. With nine games released and still going strong, it was only a matter of time before a film was to be released, and finally, in 2016 there was/
I was excited, because the filmmakers had a huge opportunity to do it right and they chose a time-period that the games had never touched, the Spanish Inquisition. There was nothing to hold them back from going all out, besides some facts from outside the animus, but this shouldn’t have been a concern when the main point should be what happens in the past.
At least this is what I thought, but the curse of bad video game movies continues with this film. Michael Fassbender plays main character Cal who is a prisoner on death row, he is brought to Abstergo to be put in the animus to help the Templars find the Apple of Eden. This does not seem like a bad start when the game is about the Assassin's searching for the Apple so they may keep it safe from the Templars, but this is where the movie goes horribly wrong.
Most of the movie is focused on outside of the animus with only about two major scenes during 15th century Spain and they are awesome! Great fights and scenery it just looked amazing, but they use very little of this in the movie! Most of it is watching Fassbender wiggle around an empty room, which isn’t quite what I wanted. If they wanted a movie about a modern-day assassins group then go all out people would like it, I’m sure, if done right, but they didn’t, they wanted something half way that did not make sense. Its barely half way, it’s mostly just a lot of exposition that was unnecessary.
I do admit some things need to be explained for those coming to see the movie who may not have played the games, but this movie gave us way too much. In the end, it all comes down to one thing, preparing to make a sequel. That’s it. "Assassin's Creed" was expecting itself to make enough money to warrant a sequel and continue Hollywood's money grabbing schemes at the expense of a great game series.
This movie could have been amazing, but instead we got two cool short action scenes and a bunch of talking and characters that we don’t care about. All we can do is hope that this film doesn’t scare away people from giving the games a shot. Overall this movie was a disappointment to me and just another notch added to the list of bad video game movies.
