Directed by: Justin Kurzel
Written by: Michael Lesslie, Adam Cooper, Bill Collage
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons
New Year, a whole new set of movies to review. Let's get this going.
Video game movies just never seem to get it right, and Assassin's Creed is no exception.
*Warning: Potential Spoilers Ahead*
I had somewhat high hopes for the film, or at least high for a video game movie. Instead of basing the story on an existing Assassin's Creed game, the film is its own story set inside of the same universe as the video games, focusing on a different lead protagonist. This avoids the usual trap video game movies fall in to where they try and cram a super-detailed 20-hour interactive story in to a 2-hour space.
Unfortunately, just because the idea is good, it doesn't stop the execution from being terrible. In order to catch people unfamiliar with the game series up, the movie's plot is very convoluted, filled with little details that simply weigh the movie down and cause an incredible amount of time within the movie to be spent in the modern era. While the game series had largely focused on the historic sequences with only infrequent trips to the present, the film apparently needs as much time as possible to flatly explain to you some of the nuances of the conflict between the Assassin's and the Templars. The 'war fought in the shadows' angle could work, but it isn't shown to us, only told to us through boring dialogue scenes that take up about 70% of the screen-time. The filmmakers also decided to go for an oddly preachy angle; the head Templars talk about how they've used religion and consumerism to control people, and certain main characters are continually pushing their goal as 'an end to violence'. It came off as a little pathetic, since the series that the movie is based on had found its success through consumerism and excessive violence.
With boring, expositional modern sequences, I was hoping to at least be entertained by the historic sequences. Somehow, these were even harder to watch. I recall several shots that let the audience witness a battle from an eagle's eye view, but the shots were so brown and obscured that I could hardly see what was happening. Every shot in the past has a dark, dry and brown colour palette, and they use so much dust and dirt to obscure every other shot that nothing really registers, like the visual equivalent of white noise. This is exacerbated during the action scenes. Most action movies nowadays get criticised for overly shaky cameras used in action, or action scenes being cut to pieces, each of which make action hard to register and less impactful, which usually makes it less enjoyable. Assassin's Creed has both of these factors, in addition to an odd choice to essentially hide half the action by shooting from behind bird cages or underneath carriages. It's as if the filmmakers didn't want to spend any time on fight choreography or CGI, so they shot everything in a way that made the action so incomprehensible it couldn't even register as cool or interesting, and hid all their poor work behind layers of dirt and dust. There is exactly one shot that impressed me across all of the historical sequences, and it's a shot they used in the trailer. There, you just watched the best part of the movie, you don't have to see it now.
One more little note, because it got egregious by the end of the film, is the lighting. At first, I thought the filmmakers were going for the 'work in the shadows' theme of Assassin's Creed by obscuring everyone's faces so that you could barely see them, but in one scene a light fixture literally dangles and causes Fassbender's Callum's face to be lit and unlit the entire scene, and it was jarring to look at. If they were going for some 'his character is choosing between the light and the dark' concept I might've been able to forgive it, but in this scene he's simply lying down because of temporarily paralysis, talking to Marion Cotillard about his injuries, and the constantly changing light doesn't help anyone.
What makes this particularly bad, however, is that the film is played so straightforward. The film is devoid of any self-realisation about the ridiculousness of its own plot, save for one line from Fassbender, which just feel out of left field because it's the only one. This also makes the film devoid of any real fun, it just takes itself way too seriously.
The film isn't completely iredeemable, though what few good qualities it has certainly doesn't make it worth watching. The acting is bearable, and I'd even go so far as to say the Jeremy Irons is good; but even the film's stellar cast can't save the movie when their dialogue is either boring or unnecessarily weird. The film's historic actions sequences are awful, but the film's climax is a modern action sequence that has a few decent flourishes.
The Verdict: I found Assassin's Creed to be an largely unenjoyable experience. The film was poor in almost every regard, and had few redeeming factors. Perhaps fans of the series will get more enjoyment out of it because it's their favourite product on the big screen, but otherwise I would not recommend this movie at all.
Rating: 3.5/10
Published January 2nd, 2017
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