For those who are fans of film as well as videogames we all know that it is almost impossible to have an amazing Videogame to film adaptation. Videogames 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 all at once. Some come out tolerable such as the first Silent Hill movie, that can bring you vaguely back to the feeling the game gave you while not being quite what you want. Then there are ones like Silent Hill 2 and Super Mario Bros that are just flat at bad and causes fans of the games to cringe.
One of my personal favorite videogame series is the Assassins Creed Series made by Ubisoft, where you are playing 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 this year 2016 a film was released based on this series.
I was so excited for this film because they had a huge opportunity to do it right with the fact that they chose a time-period that the games had never touched, the Spanish Inquisition. Nothing to hold them back from going all out besides some facts from the 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 videogame 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 Assassins 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 and do it, people would like 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 not 100% necessary.
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, expecting itself to make enough money to warrant a sequel to continue the money grabbing at the expense of this 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 one more added to the list of bad videogame movies.
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