The new Assassin's Creed movie was finally released in theaters and, surprise, surprise, it sucks. Or, to put it more objectively, reviewers do not have a favorable opinion of the movie. It has received a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes. One could argue that those reviews come from people who are not familiar with the games, but even gamers do not seem to have a favorable opinion of the movie. Chris Stuckman, a youtube reviewer, called it "an awful movie" and Angry Joe said, "do not go and waste your time and money on Assassin's Creed."

A lot of the reviews for the movie echo the same ideas. The movie is depressing. The modern day sections are boring. The action is good, but only if you don't mind jump cuts that make seeing the action in any detail nearly impossible. The script is lifeless and confusing. It doesn't make sense half the time. The movie has no heart. Most importantly, the movie misses the entire point of the games it is based on.

This shouldn't be surprising. It has been a common trend among video game movies. Even the best in the general, like The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (36% on Rotten Tomatoes) or Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (44% on Rotten Tomatoes) are only ok as far as movies go. Many, like the Doom movie, are only poor imitations of their video game counterparts and can only be considered related to video games in name only. Some are downright, cringe-inducingly bad. I'm looking at you Super Mario Bros. Heck, the Alone in the Dark movie has only 1% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it one of the worst movies of all time. It has gotten to the point that many gamers simultaneously celebrate and cringe every time a new video game movie is announced. We hope for the best but can only expect the worst.

There is a multitude of reasons for why video game movies don't work. A big factor for many of the movies that were released before the early 2000s was because no one was trying very hard. This was all thanks to some strange tax laws in Germany that made any investment into films 100% tax deductible. Many producers and directors took advantage of this to make a quick buck. The Game Theorists go into this topic in greater depth but the gist of it is that they didn't need to make good movies, they just needed to make a lot of them. That legal loophole was thankfully closed in the early 2000s, but it had done a lot of damage to the general. But strange legal laws don't explain everything. A lot of video game movies have been made since then and none of them turned out very well either.

Another problem with making video game movies is that they are complicated and follow an internal logic that really doesn't make any sense. Gamers often joke about "video game logic" and how ridiculous it can be at times. In the Mario franchise if you stomp on goomba heads, they die, but touch the sides of a goomba and you die. Has your character in that shooter game swallowed enough bullets to make swiss cheese jealous? Just duck behind that chest high wall for a moment and you will magically feel better. There is a small, golden device that has secretly been passed down through the ages that can control people's minds and make shadow clones of a person for some unexplained reason. Why not? All of humanity was made by an alien race that colonized the planet anyways. Also, Adam and Eve were freedom fighters. These kinds of things just wouldn't fly in a movie. But video games can get away with it. Part of it is due to the fact that video games are still a relatively new form of entertainment and video game plots were almost non-existent until very recently. Nowadays, a video game can handle having an overly convoluted plot because gamers will spend upwards of 60 or even 100 hours unraveling that plot. They can get away with having shells for characters because the characters are stand-ins for the players and add an extra layer of immersion. This works fine for video games. It doesn't work for movies.

Movies have one and a half to two hours to tell you their story. Three if the audience is very patient and has nothing better to do. The plots just can't handle the same level of complexity. Shell characters only take audiences out of the movie, because if your main character is boring what else do you have to grab onto? Plus the total leaps in logic that video games like to make, which are normally obscured through gameplay, become glaring plot holes in movies. Audiences have to pay more attention to the story and logic in a movie because there is nothing else to distract them.

At the end of the day, movie adaptations of video games are just that, adaptations. Things are lost or must be changed to fit the new medium. This is common wisdom for any adaptation, be it video game, book, or otherwise. Yet Producers and Directors have an extra hurdle to cross with video game adaptations. Video games are experienced actively by the audience. This means that the player has control and can actively participate in the events that unfold. They can choose what happens, when it happens, and if it happens at all. This agency is why video games are so much fun. It also helps to distract the audiences from things that don't really make a whole lot of sense. But books and movies are passive mediums. Audiences digest what happens, but have no say in what they are seeing. They simply sit back and let the story happen to them. So when a video game is adapted into a movie, a big part of the experience is lost. This is why even newer video game movies don't work. The core experience of a video game does not translate to movies.

All of this being said, there is one video game movie that I would argue is actually pretty good. Ironically, it is another Assassin's Creed movie. Assassin's Creed: Lineage came out in 2009. It has no Rotten Tomatoes score, but IMBD rates it as a 7.3/10 and Amazon gives it a 4/5. Lineage is only a little over a half an hour long and it follows Giovanni Auditore as he investigates a conspiracy that threatens to destroy one of Italy's most powerful families. The movie has many things going for it. For one, it's length is actually a blessing, not a curse. The movie doesn't bother to try and explain away everything that is happening. If anything, it acts like an extended cut-scene for the games. In many ways, that is exactly what it is. Lineage predates Assassin's Creed II by less than a month. It is meant to be paired with the video game and acts as some extra backstory that gives context to the game. Lineage assumes its audience already knows the games and that saves it from having to give a load of boring, world building exposition. The games have that covered. What is more, the characters in Assassin's Creed II are based on their live action counterparts in the movie. So the performances, appearances, and even voices match seamlessly with the game. This is why the movie works. It isn't trying to be a feature length creation or a stand alone story. It does not try to separate itself from its partnering game.

Lightning struck once with video game movie adaptations. I doubt it will ever strike again.