Assassin's Creed

As a young boy Callum Lynch witnessed his father murder his mother. Now, 30 years later, he is being executed for murder. However, the execution is faked and, instead of dying, he is transported to a special facility. It turns out that he is descended from a 15th century master-assassin, Aguilar, a member of the Assassin's Brotherhood. The plan is to train him in the ways of his forefather. This will enable him to fight the arch-enemy of his forefather, the Templars.

Great cast, very weak script. Plot is very basic and much of the movie consists of predictable, well-choreographed fight scenes. The writers try to throw in some intrigue and purpose by introducing the Apple of Eden but it is a fairly weak plot device.

Great cast - Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson, Charlotte Rampling - but these talents are all wasted due to the action-driven, no-substance script. Michael Fassbender can only blame himself for appearing in such a piece of crap - he co-produced the movie.

It's a movie based on a game so it will never be good anyway. In that respect then, it features a cast that is too good, and a thoroughly confusing plot. Given Ubi Soft and their involvement, a broken and unfinished product is something they are fantastic at giving us and this film doesn't disappoint in that regard.

Assassin's Creed is about a corporation who wants to unlock history's dark secrets. They plan on achieving it by using a device called the animus that uses the blood of the target's descendant to create a virtual environment of the ancestor's memory. The corporation is run by the Templars and their counterpart are called the Assassins.

Having played most of the games in the video game series, I felt this was a pretty lack luster attempt at capturing the story. Nothing is really explained in great detail like in the games, which was unfortunate but I can give it a pass since I shouldn't expect a movie that is only two hours long to explain too many of the secrets. What I can't forgive is the fact they continually addressed the apple over and over again but never explained its full significance. The scenes that took place in the past almost felt unnecessary as it never really furthered the plot.

All of the characters seemed pretty uninteresting... well at least compared to their video game counterparts. I honestly can't go into detail about them as most of their dialogue was just short sentences. They never became good three dimensional characters but instead cardboard cut outs of Desmond, Lucy, and Warren. The movie was just one long trailer for the games which granted was Ubisoft's intention and they didn't hide that fact. They pretty much even said before the movie was released that Assassin's Creed will not be a great film. The main goal is to get more people into the game series. That is my take away from this movie, Assassin's Creed is so vague in the story and characters that casual movie goers will be thinking "you know what, I didn't learn anything from this movie but I want to. Maybe I should try the game."

If you are a fan of the series, especially if you enjoyed the events that took place in the present. I expect you will be disappointed in the movie. If I were to put the movie on the video game scale, I would say it was better than Unity (by far) and would be even with Syndicate.

Assassin's Creed is definitely not a movie that you need to see in the theaters. It is more of a movie that should be rented but even that I am unsure about as I type this.

This movie was just confusing, man.

I understood most of it due to me having played the games, but even some of the sequences that were flashing back and forth had me super confused. It was clearly made with the intent of becoming a series, which left it with such an unsatisfying ending to the story.

I felt like it was short for how much they put in there; I really liked the way Fassbender was playing the main character of Cal, with a sort of insane twist to him due to the Animus side-effects. However, this was not explored enough and the connection between him and his ancestor made no sense, especially with its culmination toward the end. In the game series, this connection between the Animus user and the ancestor is explored in much more depth, and I feel like the film attempts to capture some of that emotion and condense it way too much to come across as anything meaningful.

As a fan of the game series, my expectations were quite high. I was therefore pleased to see that a lot of the movie can be related back to the games. The story features are similar as well as the historic atmosphere. The fighting scenes are nicely shown, but are a bit to dominant throughout the entire movie. The depth of the story can be better as well.

The actors do a good job, but there isn't much time to really get to know them.

All in all, a movie that did not disappoint me as an Assassins Creed fan, but not the best movie of the year either.