Assassin's Creed - review

Release Date: ​December 21, 2016 

Who Now?
 
​​Assassin’s Creed was supposed to prove that the video game movie renaissance was upon us. It was supposed to break the trend of bad video game movies and highlight what could be done with adaptations of established interactive stories. It was supposed to be the beacon of hope that the soon to follow video game movies would rival those of the comic book movies that have taken over the theaters. It is really disappointing to report that Assassin’s Creed does not fulfil this role.

The first major problem with this movie is the story. What actually happens and what are the characters called, I couldn’t tell you. Walking out of the movie theaters I could not recall any single character's’ name from the movie because they so unmemorable. The movie is unmemorable and will be quickly forgotten. The changes they made to the Assassin’s Creed lore is drastic and pretty bad, and even more egregious is that fact that it doesn’t work in the movie either. I am not so attached to the lore from the video games that I would dismiss the movie altogether, but the reason it is so bad is because it was poor overall. I get that you might have to change some things for the movie to be more interesting than its source material, this has been happening to books for so long. The fact that it is still horrible is where my dismay comes into play. The story sucked, it didn’t make much sense, and nothing was memorable. There were a couple glimmers of hope but they were so short and few that they hold no candle to the final overall work.

I usually do not talk about film making techniques and other technical practices that make a movie, but this time it cannot be avoided. Assassin’s Creed was one of the worst shot movies I have ever seen. The constant cutting to irrelevant scenes while more interesting action are going on, or the continued zooming out effect they tried doing to give you scale of the situation. During action sequences, the few scenes the movie did have, it would cut mid fight to something that did not have action in the scene and halt momentum. The constant zooming out to show the really bad CGI city of 13th century spain, and the absurd amount of smoke in every shot.

Assassin’s Creed was supposed to be the peoples’ champion, and for the two people that clapped after the movie ended it was, but for every other sane person it was literal shit. It is sad to see so much money wasted on such a bad movie, and that’s why it rounds out all of the movies that I have seen this year.

                                        5/10
                               Just Don't See It