The filmmakers behind Assassin's Creed have great guts in adapting one of Ubisoft's popular games. Instead of making it light for consumption for mainstream audiences, they make this movie a very serious film, with a poetic and philosophical touch a la Macbeth, a previous collaboration between director Justin Kurzel with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. They are as if they do not know - or maybe know but do not want to worry - that the audience needs coherence.
I think the experience of playing his game does not help much in understanding the movie (well, nothing can be true), maybe an exception for those of you who have the same logic frequency as Michael Lesslie, Adam Cooper and Bill Collage who wrote the script. There are many dialogs containing expositions, but very few of them make sense. In most durations, I do not know what the characters are talking about.
Ever several times played it, Assassin's Creed gameplay is about skipping buildings and killing enemies. And in this context, through the skill of the director who succeeds in creating a scene that on paper looks absurd in Macbeth being a classy moment, Assassin's Creed is a stylish gaje movie.
Through the prologue it is told that for hundreds of years a secret society called the Knights Templar sought Apples of Eden (?), An ancient heirloom which he said could wipe out free will (do not ask!). If free will disappears, the human tendency for violence also perish, and man will live regularly under the totalitarian rule of the Knights Templar.
Fassbender plays as two different characters from two lines. The first was Cal Lynch, a criminal who would be executed with a deadly shot in a Texas prison but instead awoke at a suspicious research center belonging to Abstergo Industries in Madrid. Sophia (Cotillard) tells that he and other researchers (including his father played by Jeremy Irons) are doing research with a tool called Animus that serves to evoke the memory of the ancestors. To be honest, their real mission is to find out the whereabouts of Apple Eden.
The ancestor of Cal turned out to be Aguilar (also played by Fassbender), a member of Assassin's Creed who was the arch-rival of the Knights Templar. Animus facilitates Cal to return to the past, feel the experience of his ancestors (think virtual reality game). It was 1492, where the Assassins were tasked with ensuring that the apple of Eden was not seized by the Knights Templar.
Of course, Aguilar's story part is much more interesting than today. This section involves the action sequences that characterize the game, ranging from fun chases, parkour ria on the roof to kill-bunuhan with a dagger. Aguilar and his partner, Maria (Ariane Labed) is adept at running and jumping. There was a scene where they were turned upside down on a horse-drawn carriage. The camera moves with agility until it's hard to understand the details, but it looks cool. Kurzel presents an atmosphere that is not less gloomy than Macbeth, but he knows how to take a dynamic action sequence, although in some parts looks too energetic. The special set design and effects provide a pleasant medieval visual.
Cal is not the only object of research there. There is a room that contains dozens of other objects (one of which is Michael K. Williams) and another room containing the failed object. At some point, we need an explanation and the film does not give it satisfactorily. In turn, back and forth, several times killing momentum. In one scene referencing the iconic scenes in the game, Aguilar performs a deadly challenge and the story moves spontaneously at Cal in the present. Is he safe? Of course. But how?
The film does look like a strange choice for Kurzel and Fassbender, and it gets stranger when both of them give their maximum effort. Similarly, other actors whose capacity is not playing games (Brendan Gleeson, Charlotte Rampling), who committed to bring dialogue with the intense expression of any senonsens. The right moment in the middle of the film when Fassbender hears info about all kinds of conflict between Templar vs Creed then says "What the going on here?"; a sentence that also represents audience anger will be an element of unclear movie plot. Good when moviemaker skills are emblazoned in the movie, but Assassin's Creed really needs to chill the fout.