Review of Assassin's Creed (2016) by Stuart F — 22 Jan 2017

Assassin's Creed review. The short version of this review is that the curse remains. Computer game to movie adaptations have met with varied success over the years with some being slightly enjoyable and some being absolutely awful.

But somehow none of them have been great. And I don't see why. All a studio needs to do is take the basic premise or universe of that game and add a decent story. Why is that so hard? When you have something like Assassin's Creed which comes with so much history and lore with wonderful action scenes guaranteed, it seems like a no brainer that this movie will succeed.

It didn't. Assassin's Creed has some solid actors doing some reasonable acting with some very nice filming thrown in. But overall the story just drags, nothing feels important, everyone is so glum and broody and in the end you just don't really know why anyone is doing anything.

And I am a fan of the games who came in with knowledge of the franchise. I pity anyone trying to work out the science or motivations of the characters without any background knowledge. I went into the cinema thinking that this movie could be really good because the games are.

As I left I realised my mistake. The games are good because you get to act out all those amazing action sequences and you get to live the life of whichever character you are playing. All the stuff that joins those sequences together is actually not very interesting.

And the movie proved that. I am disappointed, and I'm worried. In the next few years I have heard that movie studios are looking to make Half Life and Portal into movies. These are two of my favourite games and they deserve to be good.

But we only get one chance at it and everything is pointing towards studios still not knowing how to make a good computer game movie adaptation. I want to remain hopeful.