"We Work In The Dark To Serve The Light..."
We begin our descent into the year ahead in film with perhaps the most anticipated live-action video game release in recent memory. Beginning all the way back in 2007, the Assassin's Creed franchise was a spectacular addition to the gaming world, producing more and more content with each and every new release, resulting in enough worldwide popularity to garner an inevitable film adaptation. Whilst it has almost become clichéd to stamp every video game adaption as utter, utter tripe, the signs for Assassin's Creed were excitingly upbeat considering the talent on display at the heart of the film's production, with Snowtown and Macbeth director Justin Kurzel being a subverted, interesting choice to conduct the film's leading stars, stars which include the likes of Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, both of whom were so superb in Kurzel's blood-stained Shakespearean adaptation of the Scottish play back in 2015. As a fan of the original video game franchise, something of which I suspect will be the case for the majority of the films' audience, Kurzel's live-action adaptation is a solid, if rather grim adaptation of the famous series, one which is undoubtedly his own movie, a rarity in Hollywood these days, but something of which ironically both positively and negatively effects the final cut of his latest cinematic venture.
When convicted murderer Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) is sentenced to death by lethal injection, he is swiftly captured by the mysterious Abstergo Industries who reveal themselves as a modern-day incarnation of the religious military order known simply as the Templar Order, a secret organisation who seek the lost Apple of Eden, an object of power which they believe will cure the violent ways of human race. Tutored by the the father and daughter duo of Sophia and Alan Rikkin, portrayed by Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Irons respectively, Lynch is asked to connect with his ancestor Aguilar, a member of the infamous Assassin's Creed, who is key to locating the long lost object of which the Templar's seek. For those privy to the narrative of the games, the storyline of the cinematic adaptation is pretty familiar, and whilst Kurzel's stamp on the movie is incredibly on-the-nose in terms of how unrelentingly grim and dark it is, both in literal and metaphorical sense, this particular notion does play a major factor in the overall feel of the films' appeal.
On the one hand, in attempting to create a much darker and less-mainstream movie than other video game adaptations in the past, Kurzel does deserve a level of recognition. yet on the other hand, it does ultimately result in a large portion of the movie being a tough nut to break, particularly I would have thought for an audience of the younger ilk of cinema-goers. What you have therefore with Assassin's Creed is an admirable if rather flawed adaptation of a fundamentally bonkers video game, particularly in a narrative sense, and whilst the film may seem a feat for those who have played the respective video games, Kurzel's vision is one of undeniable murkiness, something of which may indeed alienate both the young as well as those who have not previously had the association with the video games that many have had in the past. We start 2017 therefore with an enigma of a movie, but one which at least bears some form of positivity for the future of live-action video game adaptations.
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