Film Spotlight: Assassin’s Creed
Director: Justin Kurzel
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Michael K Williams, Jeremy Irons and Brendan Gleeson.
Plot: The Assassin’s Creed movie follows a character by the name of Callum Lynch who, through a revolutionary technology that unlocks his genetic memories, is able to experience the adventures of his ancestor, Aguilar, in 15th Century Spain. Callum discovers he is descended from a mysterious secret society, the Assassins, and amasses incredible knowledge and skills to take on the oppressive and powerful Templar organization in the present day.
Thoughts: Let me start off by saying I am a HUGE fan of the Assassin’s Creed games. Lately they have sort of regressed with the move to next gen; Unity had to deal with some bad pre-release buzz due to a graphics glitch. Syndicate was a bit disjointed in its missions and gameplay. I enjoyed both but they never came close to how good Black Flag was. Fans of the game have long thought that the series is probably more suited than any other video game to be adapted into a film. The view of videos games not getting great adaptions might be broken with Assassin’s Creed. First of all Ubisoft who make the game set up their own production company to make sure they get the film right. Secondly they have gathered some great talent in the casting and hiring of the director and finally and perhaps most crucial is they decided not to adapt any of the games, instead they have gone for an original story but it is still set in the same universe as the games. That is something which I thought Warcraft got wrong this year, adapting a story from the games instead of creating one.
Now there is still a chance that it might not work but from the trailers that have been released the footage looks very promising. They have captured the essence of the games from the parkour running, the combat and that final shot from the trailer of the iconic leap of faith. Even the modern day sequences of Fassbender’s Callum Lynch inside an Abstergo facility. The redesigned Animus which is the tool that allows the present day Lynch to access his genetic memory of his ancestors looks pretty bad ass. I expect there will be some cool little mentions and Easter eggs in reference to games. I am pretty hopeful this will break the trend of bad video game movies and hope it will kick start a new era in video game movies.
Assassin’s Creed is out December 21, 2016.
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