Assassins Creed

Really excited about this one. A little disappointed that it didn't make it to release last year as it was on the blog list for last year but not a bad way to kickstart the 117 films to be reviewed this year on the blog.


I'm guessing that loads of us reading this review are die hard Assassins Creed fans, have played every version of the game franchise multiple times and were actually really excited for this film. Those of you who are just getting in to AC may be wondering which game it was a film of- it wasn't. In order to make a successful film out of this, and there was so much potential to go wrong, they had to make another instalment of the franchise. The film of Assassins Creed starring Michael Fassbender, Marion Cottilard and Jeremy Irons follows the same philosophy and theory of all the games- the Templars finding a descendent of an assassin and using him in the animus to try and recover the lost apple. Feeling familiar? The plot is the same, Michael Fassbender is descendent from the assassins in Spain/ Mexico but his father murders his mother when he is very young. His mother was an assassin and therefore the blood runs within him but as he has no parents because his father (Brendan Gleeson) was sentenced to death but is captured by the Templars and his mother is dead. Turning to a life of crime he himself ends us facing the death penalty and being killed, except that he isn't because there would be no story- he is captured by the Templars and forced to go in to the animus.

A combination of trickery by showing him his father convinces Callum (Fassbender) to willingly enter the animus, locate the apple and almost ruin everything. Claiming that he is nothing to do with the Assassins, in the end he ends up becoming one and the apple is safely restored to a hiding place but it was a close call. With help from a few other Assassins that were also captured by the Templar there is a lot of fighting, with action in the animus almost exactly as if it were a cut scene from one of the games. Any AC fan should love this film. It's a new approach and interpretation of where AC can go and because it was never a game it opens up another set of games and room for more films. Fassbender is a good choice because they re-do the setting so that it ends up in America and Fassbender can hold an American accent and let's face it, the accent isn't that important because the character isn't Italian and he is only descendent from a Spanish assassin.

I get the feeling that this film was cause controversy within the AC fans but then again Star Wars manages that every time in that people don't really know what to make of it, they kind of love it or hate it or worse, a small percentage of them aren't sure if they do or don't like the new films. This isn't a film that you should be unsure about, you'll either like it a lot or you wont like it at all but either way, as a gaming fan you should go and see the film if only as an excuse to go and play all the games again!

Very happy to start the new year with this film, next up will be 'A Monster Calls', followed by 'Rogue One' and then 'Passenger'. Keep watching this space.