[CRITICAL] ASSASSIN’S CREED

For several years now video games have taken their taste for the cinema – already in 1999 with, for example, Metal Gear Solid. But we can not say that the adaptations of the games on the big screen have been a success so far. With ASSASSIN’S CREED they began to have good hope at the sight of the production sound that was behind. The latter being led by Ubisoft Motion Pictures – industry of Ubisoft, publisher of video games – we could expect that the film is faithful to the original work. With a substantial budget (about 200 million), a casting hollywood (Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons) and a serious director like Justin Kurzel (Macbeth), the share film also seemed to be assured. But it is clear in the end that it is not with this ASSASSIN’S CREED that will be an adaptation of a video game worthy of the name. The film managed to miss as much by its use sloppy of the universe saga, as a work of cinema.

Yet the idea of not reproduce it in a basic way one of the games – each opus takes place in a different era, and follow a new character, was relevant. Here, Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender), a descendant of Aguilar, an Assassin who lived at the end of the Fifteenth century during the Spanish Inquisition. Sentenced to death for murder, Callum is secretly recovered by the company Abstergo Industries. It attempts to annihilate the violence in the world, which each year costs several billion. Already the association with the financial aspect is very strange, but nevermind. Abstergo has built a machine, the Animus, which allows you to use the genetic memory. Their goal is to use it on Callum to see a part of the life of Aguilar, who would have been the last in possession of a sacred object containing the genetic code of man and the means of removing him from his free will.

“It is not with this ASSASSIN’S CREED that will be an adaptation of a video game worthy of the name”

No need to say more to that, one realizes that the scenario ofASSASSIN’S CREED is rough and incomprehensible. It becomes quite ironic to see the question of free will and the need to suppress the violence in man in an action movie in hollywood which leaves the end a good hundred dead behind him. But mostly the film does not bother to develop truly themes. Barely there throws us a few information through the use of dialogues poorly written, and forget at the same time to bring a real depth to the characters. For example, it will be again (after Batman v Superman and Captain America) issue of the loss of a mother. One of Callum, who was murdered by his own father. Ease story disconcerting that should justify most of the actions of the protagonist. Obviously, it does not.

Of course we would have been able to make abstraction of all this (being very lenient) if at least the visual part, had answered this. Nothing seemed to prevent Justin Kurzel and his team plunge us in the Spain of the Fifteenth century, with fights dizzying between the Assassins and the knights Templar (their enemies for centuries). The reproduction of the time even being a success story in itself. But ASSASSIN’S CREED eventually reduces to the minimum these sequences in the Animus, however, the more exciting, to focus on the kind of prison of secret Abstergo where is Callum and the other descendants of the Assassins. Hardly will there be during a scene with Michael Fassbender and Ariane Labed (too little) move through a crowd and deliver a coup de grace on their victim, jump from rooftop to rooftop, climb walls and run on the ropes – in short, to do the parkour while eliminating their attackers. Another will offer a fast-track race horse.

End-to-end, it is not more than twenty minutes of entertainment. And yet, we cannot say that these scenes are so successful that, since, in addition to being quite legible, unfortunately, they are interspersed with plans of this where Callum, hooked up to the Animus, which are reproduced in the empty gestures of his ancestor. A mounting laborious punctuated by the bad taste of Kurzel , which multiplies the large movements of the camera at each of its transitions. Thus, behind an aesthetic that is correct, ASSASSIN’S CREED can’t hide all its flaws in implementation. A boring movie and talkative, which may well result in the frustration of the players as spectators lambda who hoped to see a minimum of show.

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