Assassin's Creed (2016)

[RyanSz 3140]

Video game movies almost never do well either with viewers or the box office, and this one seems either destined to fail or finally break the code on how to be a good video game adaptation. Unfortunately it has a couple things going for and against it. The pros are you have Michael Fassbender in the lead role and the whole overall design matches the feel of the game albeit a little altered (the machine in the video game in basically a VR pod the character is hooked up to rather than a giant harness in a room similar to the X-Men's Danger Room). The cons are that the budget for this movie is a huge 175-200 million dollars and the overall canon of this series is dense as hell, with the overall goal of the series not being fully revealed until 3-4 games into the series, so to try and cram enough in to a 2 hour movie to make sense is a real uphill climb.

 

I hope I'm wrong because as a lifelong video game player and a fan of this series that they have finally cracked the code, but I'm not holding my breath given Hollywood's track record.

[Ofcoursemyhorse 1043]

I think it has a chance to be decent at the very least. The director has done some solid movies before this, and the Assassins Creed story lends well to being adapted mainly for the fact that there is a different protagonist in every game. So they were able to just invent their own characters and storyline for the movie.

 

They have a great cast if the writings at least better than the video games (which isnt particularly that great) I think it really does have a shot to be among the higher rated video game movies.

[NathanGordon 1096]

I think it has a chance to be decent at the very least. The director has done some solid movies before this, .

Snowtown Murders was good, but aside from last year's MacBeth -- also with Fassbender -- he's made a handful of small indie dramas. He's directed no action at all, which is what's going to drive this film (I assume these games aren't text adventures). I worry that, as is standard practice for new franchise starters, they grabbed an indie director and put them in suddenly way over their head, so that he could be a scapegoat when the movie flops.

 

In a best case scenario, they brought in some action choreographers from Hong Kong to give this film the look it needs. Unfortunately it looks like a bunch of CGI gobbledygook with the camera spinning everywhere. Who knows, but I think this will do about as well as Warcraft did earlier in the summer, which is to say not a flop, but not a mega blockbuster.

 

Sidebar: how cool would it have been to make something more like Hardcore Henry? Writing aside, that movie was exciting and felt like what a video game adaptation should be.

[RyanSz 3140]

I'm assuming that they are either going to condense or remove the Pieces of Eden stuff and the idea of a different character playing the Assassin in the flashback would keep in tone with the game, though I'm assuming Fassbender will be kept on as the main person in the machine since they are hoping for this to be a franchise starter. The game series is interesting as the first game had this huge twist where it is revealed to all be a hologram of your characters past, which made a lot of people happy after they were complaining about the game looking glitchy and not ready to be released after it was shown at the various game conventions. I kinda wish they had followed a similar path with the movie but since there have been close to a dozen games made in the series and it's been a while since the first game came out so people would know the twist, and it would possibly confuse newcomers to the series in a way that Sucker Punch was confusing for some with the story within a story within a story.

[Ofcoursemyhorse 1043]

Snowtown Murders was good, but aside from last year's MacBeth -- also with Fassbender -- he's made a handful of small indie dramas. He's directed no action at all, which is what's going to drive this film (I assume these games aren't text adventures). I worry that, as is standard practice for new franchise starters, they grabbed an indie director and put them in suddenly way over their head, so that he could be a scapegoat when the movie flops.

 

In a best case scenario, they brought in some action choreographers from Hong Kong to give this film the look it needs. Unfortunately it looks like a bunch of CGI gobbledygook with the camera spinning everywhere. Who knows, but I think this will do about as well as Warcraft did earlier in the summer, which is to say not a flop, but not a mega blockbuster.

 

Sidebar: how cool would it have been to make something more like Hardcore Henry? Writing aside, that movie was exciting and felt like what a video game adaptation should be.

 

 

I can only imagine that he also got the job based on his previous working relationship with Fassbender. But honestly, between the two Punisher movies I'll always like Lexi Alexanders more. Which i'm sure is partially poisoning my opinion on this movie.

[RyanSz 3140]

Okay having seen this today, I think it could make for a pretty decent episode on the confusion front alone. This is very much like the game in that the scenes in the past are by far better than the stuff happening in the present and the fight choreography is actually pretty good. Unfortunately the changes that they made to the Animus machine for the sake of the movie are pretty ridiculous as Fassbender is jumping around while hooked up to a harness and seeing blurred images of his past self. There are also hologram lights which allow everyone else in the room to see the same thing he does is also nuts because they also see his delusions which should not be possible more so than anything else.

 

Maybe the most HDTGM moment of the whole movie is near the end when Marion Cotillard is talking to her dad played by Jeremy Irons and he mentions the goal of their organization, which she clearly knows about since she's been raised in this group her entire life, and she is shocked to see that they are the bad guys, basically like what happened to Richard Prior in Superman 3.

[bella_008 188]

I do love when they do new movies so I think this could be good especially with how crazy the trailer looks and the general quality of most video game adaptations, I look forward to June trying to understand this mess.

[RyanSz 3140]

To be fair it's better quality than most game adaptations, which isn't saying much, but you could tell that they were really trying to make this a good game. It also helped that they created a new main character for the movie rather than trying to go off what was already shown in the game. The problem with this is that they changed some built in anchor points in from the game like how the people who are put into the machine are not really killers in real life, their ancestors are. This is done for this whole violence is hereditary angle the movie is playing up, but it just falls flat overall and is unnecessary.