Assassin's Creed- film review (Spoilers)

Assassin’s Creed- Film Review (Spoilers)

Assassin’s Creed is the latest live-action video game film adaptation; this is the latest attempt to make a critically successful video game adaptation. Assassin’s Creed is directed by Justin Kurzel, and stars Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Irons. The film is a reunion for the director Justin Kurzel and Michael Fassbender after they had worked together with the recent adaptation of Macbeth in 2015. Assassin’s Creed takes the narrative from the video game itself, Fassbender’s character Cal Lynch is related to an ancestor from the Spanish inquisition, and his ancestor knows where this McGuffin known as the apple of Eden which will stop the human race from being violent and bring peace to the human race. This is a film which many people were hoping that it would be good, but is Assassin’s Creed the video game live-action film adaptation that breaks the curse of the video game film?

There are some good aspects to this film, the main actors that are involved like Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Irons work with the source material that they have been given. Michael Fassbender gives a performance that isn’t his best work, his performance isn’t as good as he was in the recent Macbeth but his performance in this film gives a great sense of believability with his character. The only reason why the viewers believe that the character is being put through these emotional moments that the characters explore. Marion Cotillard is always good with the roles that she is given, and her character is there to provide the information about the science behind the machine known as the Animus. Cotillard’s performance is good but it is not as good as the Macbeth adaptation that was released in 2015. Jeremy Irons is also in this film, he is an actor that can either give a good performance like in Die Hard with a vengeance or he can give a terrible performance like in Dungeons and Dragons. In this film his performance is mediocre, it is not great but it is nothing special, these actors are only capable of good performances with good material and excellent direction. Justin Kurzel is a director who hasn’t done many films at this current time, he is probably known most for this film and the recent Macbeth film. Kurzel is a director who can direct people, the performance that he gets out of the actors that he works with are always good. Kurzel is a director that can make anything interesting and he is more of visual director and this is something which can be seen in Assassin’s Creed because Kurzel can communicate emotion visually and he does it very well. The scenes that need to communicate some deep emotion alongside Fassbender’s performance show some depth. Kurzel has some interesting concepts in the action scenes, there are some excellent camera placements, and this shows the audience great detail.     

However, this film has quite a few issues, but the main issue with this film would be the script. The script is poorly written and this is because other than Michael Fassbender’s character Cal Lynch is the most developed. The characters are developed enough, and this means that a viewer won’t care about the characters and this makes the action sequence tensionless because the characters are developed in enough detail. When Cal Lynch is first put into the Animus, the script doesn’t explore the character enough. The character needs more depth and they need to be explored because these are the characters that are the action sequences. An example of this would be when Aguliar finds the location of the apple, his female counterpart is killed during the action. In any other film the characters that are involved in the action would have been developed and the characters that are usually killed off are explored in great detail because this give the audience a reason to care about the characters being killed off. This is something which is lacking in Assassin’s Creed because of the script and the character is not developed enough. The same thing can be seen with the character that Jeremy Irons plays, he is the main antagonist in this film, and he wants the apple but the film never explains why he wants the apple, the reason for this is only during one line of dialogue and that is all. While the characters are explored, the narrative at times can be very hard to follow because there isn’t enough detail and it is not easy to follow.

There might be another reason why the characters are developed enough and this might be due to the fact that the studio has interfered and the reason for this might be because there was rumour that the film was meant to be about two hour and twenty minutes long and if this was the case, the narrative might have explored the characters more and this would haven’t the action would have had more tension because of this. However, the script is not the only issue with this film, the editing is something which is also bad. The editing makes the action sequence hard to follow, when someone makes an action film there is something that is more important than anything and this would be the build-up. In the build-up to an action scene, the audience needs to understand where each character is in relation to one another, and this geography is something that makes action easy to follow. 

However, the antagonistic forces just appear out nowhere and the protagonists just need to deal with, and this could have been done better. The another aspect to understand with the editing is that the shot durations don’t last long enough for the audience to understand what is happening in each shot.

Assassin’s Creed is not a good film, it doesn’t break the curse of the bad live-action video game adaptation films and that is something which is disappointing for a couple of reasons. The first thing is that there is a good film hidden in this film, if the editing wasn’t so bad then the action would be clear and you could understand what is happening in the action scenes, and if the runtime was longer than the characters could be explored in more detail. This is a film which is one step closer to getting a good live-action video game adaptation, but we aren’t there yet, and we all thought that this would be the film to break that curse. The talent that are involved in this film could have made a better version of this film but either the script stopped them or the studio stop them or maybe a combination of both.

Rating: 4/10

Conclusion: while not terrible, everyone deserves a better film and the talent involved should have made a better film. This is film which will be subjective and different people would look at this film differently, but a lot of people won’t like this film for poor editing and poor script.