Review of Assassin's Creed (2016) by Vilém N — 04 Feb 2017

You could tell this movie is bad from the trailer itself. Suprisingly, it's not bad for the reasons the trailer would suggest it is. No, it's not a movie over-saturated with mindless, uninventive action (which actually comes off... fine? in the end). It's because of it's inconsistent plot, uninteresting assassins characters and awkward, too long shots. The only thing I liked about the movie was that everyone apparently tried. Especially Michael Fassbender; only the shot of his face as his character experiences what he thinks will be the last moments of his life was enough to make me feel more invested in everything in the movie. On the other hand, Marion Cotillard was very boring in this film. I'm not sure if this was supposed to be intentional, but the contrast between her showing hardly any emotion and Michael Fassbender who expresses most of his experiences through his face really doesn't work well.

As for the technical aspects of the movie: the CGI is ok, I was sometimes thrown out because of it, the stunts are very good and the music really worked. The real technical flaw of Assassin's Creed is the cinematography. I already mentioned that this movie has some too long shots, especially the expositional ones. The very first expositional shot of this movie is already weird. It's of an eagle which flies over awkwardly pasted pictures(?) of mountains for maybe a minute, serving no purpose, only to prolong the runtime. The same goes for another shot of an eagle flying through a medieval city for a similar amount of time. There are people fighting all around and you would think the assassins would probably appear in this city. But then the shot suddenly shifts to an entirely different location where the next action sequence takes place. Why was this shot done this way? We will probably never know.

And don't even get me started on the color correction. It's vomit inducing.

All in all, this movie comes out as an awkward mix of boring, mostly expositional scenes in the present and a few fine action sequences taking place in the past, that are a lot of the time ruined by shaky cam. The performances are good, but the characters aren't intersting enough. If you want a good story, characters, Assassins and action, just play the games.