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Will Assassin’s Creed Be Yet Another Bad Game Movie?

Will Assassin’s Creed Be Yet Another Bad Game Movie?

Come December 21, Ubisoft, in collaboration with 20th Century Fox, is going to come out with an Assassin’s Creed movie. The trailer has been released and frankly, my hopes aren’t high. Kanye West, f***ing really? The trailer doesn’t tell us much about the movie, other than costume and actor choices. Both of those appear to be just fine, the costumes look well enough, though I have seen better cosplay. The actors I cannot judge until the full movie is out, as I am not familiar with any of them save Jeremy Irons and Michael Fassbender.

As much as I adore both of these men, amazing actors do not always end up in the best movies. The scriptwriter, director, cinematographer, and costume designer can make or break a movie, in my opinion. These things are not in actors’ control and can often undermine their skills despite their best efforts.

Assassin’s Creed is not off to a good start, script-wise. There is simply no amount of smouldering from Fassbender that can compensate for the frankly terrible story and plot of the series. Rather, the way Ubisoft has always executed these plots has been terrible. The premise is something that can be reworked into something very cool, but what Ubisoft truly fails at is creating relatable and dynamic characters. From Ezio to Edward, they just fall short. As the player, we hardly know anything about these characters, and I would say that Ezio is their greatest sin in this regard. Ezio has entire sub-series dedicated to him and yet we know nothing about his personality.

Let’s list what we do know about Ezio: He likes whores, both as friends and lovers, he likes women, he hates the Templars because they killed his father and put his family in danger, and he loves his family dearly. Okay, sexuality and caring for sex workers are not defining personality traits. Never once has heterosexuality defined who a person is. Hating the Templars, okay, I think any human would be pretty upset after such brutality to their family. Relatable, but still not a defining personality trait. The fact he loves his family, now that’s a good start! It speaks volumes about Ezio’s beliefs and values besides that of the Assassin’s creed itself. But it’s not enough. It cannot be the only personality trait Ezio possesses.

Will Assassin’s Creed Be Yet Another Bad Game Movie?

Translating such a character to film can only be remedied with good cinematography. In a video game, you can skip the story bits and cut right to the slicing and dicing, allowing a wicked melee attack to wow the player. This is nothing other than really good cinematography. The same can be done for a film – if you make it equally pretty, it might make a good movie. Take any James Bond movie, for example: here’s a really good action film with hardly any plot. This is where the cinematographer comes in. If you can make those action scenes look like Picasso unfolding before you – Bond adjusting his cuffs like a badass as an explosion occurs behind him – then you’ve got a decent movie.

That being said, let us not forget that Ubisoft has tried making an Assassin’s Creed movie before. This half hour film feels like two hours with a running lack of intriguing anything. The plot is kind of explained, but not really. They rely heavily on the game, Assassin’s Creed II , to explain the gaps. The costumes are awful. They should not look like they’ve been cut from a single metre of fabric. The camera’s filter tries to make up for this, hiding in tinted shadows the clearly plastic weapons and fraying costumes. The filter also attempts to hide the very excessive use of green screen, to the point where I wonder if they bothered to build a set at all.

Judging by the images from the 2016 movie, however, it looks like they’re at least on location and the costumes look a million times better. So can Ubisoft, with 20th Century Fox beside them, change their ways and make a really good film? I certainly hope so, if only for Irons’ and Fassbender’s reputations. With such flimsy characters and poorly executed plot in the games, they’re going to need an amazing team to pull it off. If they succeed, I hope to see a character like Ezio as the new James Bond, only with a sword. And frankly, Fassbender’s smoulder will only aid such an endeavor.

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