Happy New Year Everyone! Hope you
all had a blast during the holiday season.
So I’m back with the first review
of 2017, granted it’s for a 2016 movie and I should have done this last year
you might say, but I got distracted by the festivities and this is kinda the
hardest review I’ve had to work on, trying to distinguish and distance the
video game from the movie seemed near impossible and I realize I probably
should have done a preview before the review, but I’m quite satisfied with the
end product (I think).
WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS.
So after many years of rumors and
speculations Assassins Creed (AC for the rest of the review) was primed for release
in Dec 2016, strongly pushed for by Micheal Fassbender, the man who had
been recommended and supported by fans
to play Desmond Miles/Altair, assuming the lead role in a somewhat different
capacity of Callum Lynch/Aguilar. The movie is based on the Ubisoft’s Assassins
Creed video game franchise and undoubtedly had the material to become an enjoyable
and watchable affair despite what we’ve come to expect from video game
adaptations. To say that the AC series have enjoyed some level of success in
the past would be an understatement, however most would feel that the series
has reached its peak, stagnated, churning out the ‘same’ video game year after
year (admittedly with cool new features every now and then), so for many fans,
a movie was quite a breath of fresh air and also a platform to ignite old
flames as well as to initiate newer fans, however if this movie was to be the
first of a series I’m not quite sure it did enough to set the tone.
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| Micheal Fassbender as Desmond/Altair in fan-made poster in 2012. |
So what’s this Assassins Creed about? you might ask, well let me indulge you while showing off my scholar-like
knowledge of the AC franchise and that’s just me being modest, I’ve played all
releases save for Liberty and Syndicate as I’m typing this, so that’s AC1, AC
2, Brotherhood, Revelations, AC 3, AC4: Black Flag, Rogue and Unity all under
my belt. (Let me know if I missed any) A little backstory here though to get
things going;
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| Assassins of the franchise L-R; Altair, Ezio, Aveline, Connor, Evie, Jacob, Arno, Edward, Baptiste |
Assassins Creed basically is a
stealth Open World game set in great historical periods in the world which have
defined the state of humanity till today; The Holy Crusade, The Renaissance
era, The Ottoman Empire, The American Revolution, The French Revolution etc. intertwining
these real time events and the real people involved with the behind the scenes
war between the Assassins; who want freedom for man and the Templars who
believe free will to be a luxury mankind cannot afford and value order above
all things.
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| Juno with an Apple of Eden. |
The war between the two factions is borne from the aftermath and the disappearance of Those Who Came Before Us, a race of super advanced sentient beings (otherwise called gods such as Juno, Minerva, Apollo etc.) who basically ruled the Earth and pretty much herded human beings as we would do cattle, but who became extinct thousands of years ago when a cataclysmic meteor hit the planet akin to what led to the extinction of the Dinosaurs.
The Pieces of Eden are basically
a testament to those ancient times, precursor artifacts of a time before man’s
domination of the planet, when these instruments were used by the gods to
ensure obedience and keep order above man. After the extinction of those who
came before us, men throughout history have used these artifacts to enforce
order and peace at any cost, and eventually these have been lost in time from
the wars between the Assassins and Templars. Abstergo Industries, a modern day
front for the modern day Templars use a machine called the Animus which is
capable of extracting genetic memories embedded in the DNA of descendants of
the two factions in a bid to find the artifacts and restore order to the world,
an idea which sounds better than it actually is. Suffice to say it is from this
somewhat complicated backdrop that AC gains its popularity and massive
following.
I have to admit I was really
excited to see this one, it was one of my highly anticipated movies of the year
and I went in with unsuppressed expectation. I wasn’t so ‘disappointed’ at the
end of it all but I did think a lot of things could have been better and it
took a couple of days post-watch to bring out this objectivity.
The movie introduces us to two
new protagonists Callum Lynch and Aguila de Nerha as opposed to using any of the
known video game characters thus introducing the series to a new, non-gamer
audience and also to the more seasoned AC audience. I thought protagonists like
Desmond, Altair, Ezio and Edward had played their part and definitely welcomed
new leads.
So like its predecessors, AC: the
movie picks another defining moment in history, The Spanish Inquisition, (a
little history lesson here), The Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición
popularly called Inquisición Española or The Spanish Inquisition was established
in 1478 by Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. It was originally
intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in Spain, primarily to ensure the
orthodoxy of those who converted from Judaism and Islam. It is during this time that our protagonist
Aguilar de Nerha is initiated into the Assassins guild as a Master Assassin and
assigned his first mission; He and his lover/fellow assassin are to rescue the
young son of the Sultan Muhammad XII of Granada, who has been kidnapped by the
Templars in order to coerce the Sultan who is affiliated with the assassins, to
give up the Apple of Eden. Aguilar is dedicated to the doctrine of the Creed, a
man with a purpose, unshakable in faith, he is a committed man. The same can’t
be said about his future counterpart and descendant (Callum Lynch) a wanderer
from a young age after witnessing the murder of his mother by his father, Cal
is on death row for murder but after his death is faked, is whisked away to Abstergo’s
secret lab for the harnessing of his genetic memories. Here he’s encouraged and
coaxed by the head of the Animus research, Sophia Rikkin (Marion Cotillard)
daughter of Abstergo Industries CEO Alan Rikkin (Jeremy Irons) to assist her in
finding The Apple of Eden which she claims she wants to cure world violence
with.
In the lab he also meets other
Assassin descendants who have already been processed for their ancestral
memories, it is unclear if these Assassins were moles in Abstergo; in order to
slow down or prevent Abstergo from finding the Apple or if self-realization
through the Bleeding Effect (when you become fully synched with an ancestral
figure, gaining their abilities and memories) made them believers of the Creed.
As opposed to the 70/30 screen
time between the past and present in the games, majority of the movie takes
place in the present, probably by a 65/35 ratio reversal, understandably when trying to manage the 2hrs 20 minutes runtime of the film; meagre time to
introduce two new characters while attempting to give them some depth, creating
a meaningful, intertwined story where the actions of the past protagonist shape
the actions of the present day protagonist and also ensuring that viewers get
all the action they were enticed with in the trailers…so much to do, so little time.
I did love that there was a lot
of homage paid to the franchise as was expected, from the Assassin garb to the Assassin
Eagle who just loved the spotlight. The iconic leap of faith was also featured twice, and into water not a cart or mound of hay for obvious reasons, while
making some history along the way; the 125ft freefall performed for that stunt
became the highest freefall performed in 34 yrs.
I was quite miffed that Ezio’s
theme song was not featured on the movie, a theme which has pretty much become
the theme of AC, but I guess there was some reason for its absence, also the
scene where Callum becomes one with the Creed and sees Assassins who came
before him (not sure if they were just his ancestral ones) was pretty cool and
I must admit almost tear jerking as he’s surrounded by his parents and more
popular assassins such as Altair and Arno (those were pretty much the only two
I could make out).
I think the movie was not as
fleshed out as it could have been, a little backstory for the audience sometime
during the movie would definitely not have hurt, as I thought a regular
movie-goer might not understand so much going on with phrases like ‘cure violence’
or even why these two factions were really fighting, there were just so many
questions that needed answering for someone getting introduced to AC.
Understandably it isn’t a video game where the layers get peeled off the
further you get into it and which spans way longer than the longest movie, but there
could certainly have been a better approach to the film, I mean AC can be quite
confusing even for a passive gamer, perhaps they were trying to save all that
for the sequel.
Assassins
Creed was an enjoyable ride, though it would prove somewhat confusing and
passive for the neutral, it doesn’t engage the viewer as it could have, but it
does capture those elements that traditional fans would appreciate, not sure if
it is strong enough to secure a sequel though, and if you were waiting for that
video game adaptation to smash the box office and finally prove the critics
wrong, keep holding your breath.
Reject Rating: 5/10
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