Review of Assassin's Creed (2016) by Michael B — 11 Jan 2017

There was a lot of great graphic work done on this film. Nothing else was very well thought out.

The writing felt unfinished, and the dialogue was painful. With so little of the plot actually connecting to other pieces aside from proximity, it was hard to know what was going on. The ending had nothing leading up to it, and wasn't clear. In the beginning, the Templars claimed religion was their tool for control, but towards the end when the Piece of Eden is revealed to hold the 'genetic code of free will', it got weird. Was free will meant to be some mutation from a god's plan? Somewhere, there were pieces of a story, but Desmond tells it better.

The Abstergo compound was horribly insecure, and honestly I thought the young doctor was secretly running an Assassin training camp. They had a large group of highly skilled fighters in the same building with all of the collected 'artifacts' of their order. They were then made to relive their ancestors' memories and through the bleeding effect, which the Templars were aware of, obtain additional prowess and context for the ages-old conflict.

The protagonist was a horrible person and a weak character. I think they meant to portray him as headstrong, but he's just excessively violent. The attempt to show his morality by saying that he killed a pimp doesn't show or lead to any other side of the character, and is violent towards the only character that shows any concern for him. He does not communicate anything else about his intentions, and toward the end doesn't seem to have any goals in mind other than what's put in front of him. He didn't have to go through the animus in the end, and he did, leading the Templars to the Piece, but then made a show of killing the person seeking it (and no other Templars for some reason, even when they're all assembled and he hasn't tried to do anything but fight and kill up to then). He also doesn't look like his ancestor, but hey, we always need a white protagonist, right?

The history doesn't make much sense. The standing Sultan of the Ottomans, Bayezin II (Who was not actually named in the film), was portrayed as militarily weak (also at war with Templars in Spain...???), but in reality he rescued many Jewish and Muslim refugees from the Inquisition by sea. The alliance of Christopher Columbus with the Assassins makes no sense given Columbus' establishment and involvement with the early trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Save your money, folks.