Movie Month: Assassin's Creed (Part 2)

Go read Part 1 if you haven't, to understand what’s going on.

Every assassin is like a one-man army. The only reason they
have so much trouble is that te Templars have control
over literally everything.

Callum Lynch is reliving the memories of Aguilar through the Animus. His ancestor circa 1492 has just escaped execution and is fleeing with Maria, a fellow Assassin. This scene is what I imagine the Assassin’s Creed franchise to be: Worlds based on historical events! Fights! Archery! Daring escapes! Parkour! All, of course, intercut with scenes set in the modern day. The whole is awesome, and we get to see a large part of Granada through this chase. The scenes in the past may be the best part of this film. The only one giving the two assassins any trouble is Ojeda, Torquemada’s field commander, relentlessly hunting them down.

Oh, he will survive it. But we're never told how.

The sequence ends with the assassins making a leap of faith, jumping down from a high scaffolding to the land below. The kicker? That jump was done, for real, by Michael Fassbender’s stunt double Damien Walters. It’s one of the highest freefalls in the history of stunt doubling. What can I say, but Wow!

At Abstergo, "treatment" is shorthand for
"Dip him in water till he feels better."

The moment was, however, too intense for Cal, who has a bad reaction and needs to undergo treatment afterwards. Sofia tries to convince him to be a willing subject again, this time bringing in a necklace his mother had. Later, after he has recovered, Cal gets a visit from Alan Rikkin, Sofia's father, here to make a deal; let us find the Apple of Eden, you get your freedom. It’s unclear whether Abstergo will hold that part of the deal, seeing as the other descendants of historical assassins, who’ve also gone through the Animus to relive their respective ancestors’s memories, have shown to Abstergo everything they could and, yet, are still imprisoned within the Foundation.

"Now please don't stab me with this, or cut my throat
or anything."

As a final way to convince Cal, Alan Rikkin takes him back to the garden area of the correction facility. Some people there look like they’ve prematurely aged – younger than they seem, as a result of de-syncing too often while in the Animus, shown to discourage Cal from de-syncing. As a final carrot on the stick, Doctor Rikkin says that Cal’s father, his mother’s assassin, is another patient at the Foundation – and the Templar leaves Cal with his mom's necklace and an assassin’s retractable blade. The special effects team behind the movie went through the trouble of creating those things for real, so when Rikkin shows one, its blade is very real. His daughter Sofia has been watching, and objects to this manipulation, as she lets him know when he returns to their living quarters in Abstergo. He, however, thinks that everything is fair game – he wants the Apple fast so he can show it at the next meeting of Templars, two days later.

The assassin's hidden blade is a real thing now.

The years have NOT been kind to Cal's dad.
Then again, he spent 30 years in this damn place.

Cal has a serious talk with his father. Joseph Lynch admits that he killed his wife, a fellow assassin, to protect the creed, and that he should have killed his son as well, but found himself unable to. He can’t do it now, either. He tells his son to never return into the Animus. However, it’s not enough to discourage Cal, who instead decides to go back out of spite for his old man – which is what Alan Rikkin had intended all along. Needless to say, the other patients aren’t too happy with that decision either. Cal is plugged in.

"I hate my dad enough to help provoke the end of the
world all out of spite. I need a psychiatrist.
This place doesn't have any good ones."

By the way, that's Spanish actor Javier Gutiérrez as
Torquemada. He delivers a solid performance as an
intensely evil bastard.

Granada. An almost victorious Spanish Inquisition is bringing the sultan’s son as a trade for the Apple of Eden. Knowing that the sultan will give in, Aguilar and Maria watch on, ready to strike. They look on as the sultan takes Torquemada to the room where the Apple is hidden, and is about to give the item away… Christ, listen to the Templar as he takes the sphere and looks at it. Every time, those goddamn Templars start talking about peace, the end of war, the end of pain… But only if THEY can rule everything. There's no other way I hear it, still sounds cartoonishly evil to me.

Why is everything so dark in this film?
I bet you can barely make out what's in my
screenshots for this review!

The assassins toss smoke bombs down, then drop in. They do well against the guards in the room, but are grossly outnumbered against the ones outside. In the fight, Aguilar manages to take the Apple and use Torquemada as a shield, only to see the Inquisitor’s right-hand man Alonso de Ojeda doing the same with Maria. Asked to hand over the Apple, told by Maria to resist and run with it at the cost of her life, Aguilar hesitates, but then retracts his blade… and Maria, seeing that, stabs herself on Ojeda’s blade. Aguilar and Ojeda get into a fight, and the commander comes extremely close to victory, until Aguilar stabs him with Maria's blade. This weakens the commander enough to give the assassin an edge and kill him. Maria is dead, but Cal’s ancestor doesn’t have time to mourn; Torquemada opens the door wide for the forces of the Inquisition, so the assassin flees into the castle’s sewers.

These deadly jumps better not become a habit!

Again - can you see what's going on here?
I know because I've seen the film.
Visually-speaking, most of the film is dark like this.

Aguilar is cornered on a bridge, but makes another leap of faith and jumps off. He dives into the water below, and in the modern day, Callum reproduces these movements with such force that he breaks the Animus. The machine is still working, just enough to let the scientists see the assassin’s next actions. At a military port, Aguilar hands over the Apple of Eden to Christopher Columbus, an ally of the Creed, just before the explorer’s travel across the ocean. The Templars have their lead; the Apple was buried with Columbus in the Seville cathedral, in Spain.

Dammit, Christopher Columbus ruins everything.

But it doesn’t end there. Whether it’s the machine malfunctioning, nobody knows, but several assassins from past times appear to Cal and give him a proper introduction to the Creed. All of them seem to be his ancestors in some way. Among them? His own mother, in the cloak like all the others.

Being inducted into a gang, through a ceremony held by
its dead members, through the memories of its
newest member. That's a WEIRD way to join.

Abstergo has given them all of the abilities and talents
of assassins, and are then surprised that their
prisoners are able to fight back.

Outside of the Animus’ room, the prisoners revolt against the Foundation, using some of the very items that Abstergo had collected over time in its quest for descendants of assassins they could plug into their cursed machine. And yes, much like Cal, they’ve all learned some crazy moves from their experience. Some of them, such as Cal’s father, Emir or Nathan, don’t make it out alive, but they put up a fight till their last breath. Fighting through the place, some of the detained descendants make it to the room of the Animus, seeing the ceremony happening in Cal’s memories, displayed in the room by the holographic projectors. Alan Rikkin and his daughter left when the revolt started, despite Sofia wanting to stay so she can study this unexpected turn of events. After breaking out of the holographic “ceremony”, and seeing the other subjects in the room with him, Cal climbs up the Animus and breaks the glass dome above to hunt down the Rikkins, but their helicopter is already too far.

I'm not showing it, but the Apple of Eden? It looks like a
pétanque ball.

Alan and Sofia are next seen in Spain, at the Seville cathedral, accompanied by the Templar elder Ellen Kaye. Alan retrieves the Apple of Eden from Columbus’ tomb. Even though his daughter did all the work, he intends to take full credit for it. Sofia doesn’t accept it, although Ellen claims that the Templars know that it's thanks to her that they have the Apple.

Fun fact: This part was filmed at the Freemasons'
Hall, in London.

Cut to the Grand Templar Hall in London. The place is packed. Unbeknownst to them, the assassins from the Abstergo Rehabilitation Center have snuck their way in, cleverly getting their weapons through the metal detectors at the entrance. How clever? They brought them in pieces, and build them on-site.

Gosh, everyone in this film has parental issues.

Something's about to go wrong.

Meanwhile, Sofia is re-reading the speech her father is about to give to the council, and realizes that a) he wants full extermination of the assassins, which goes against the claims of merely “eradicating violence” that she’s been fed with, and b) he emphasizes quite clearly that the Templars don’t so much want peace as they want control of the entirety of humanity, by any means necessary. She’s starting to see him for the hypocrite he and the Templars truly are. As her father pronounces that speech during the ceremony, she walks out, only to see Cal, now in full assassin dress, coming at her. They have a talk in which he tries to convince her to help the assassins, but she’s torn on the idea; she has seen her father’s true self, but can’t bring herself to disown him.

You know, I've always wondered. The Templars say that
this thing can eradicate free will. Okay, but won't it also
do that to them as well?

Anticlimactic? Yes.
Entirely deserved? Hell yes.

Back there, in the grand room, Dr. Rikkin has finished his speech. He opens the Apple of Eden, which causes some holographic projections to come out – okay, this thing is definitely not an ancient biblical artefact if it can do stuff like that. Wrist blade attached, Cal walks into the grand room. In a second, he sneaks behind Alan, slashes the man’s throat, steals the Apple and runs off. Hearing the commotion, Sofia runs in, only to see her father’s corpse – and that sight makes her side with the Templars for good, swearing revenge on Callum Lynch.

I'd be up for a game where those three are playable in the
modern day against the Templars.

Despite the opportunity they had to cause a true carnage in the very heart of the Templars, the three assassins on this mission (Cal was accompanied by Moussa and Lin) have fled without killing anyone else, and observe London from a rooftop. They’re legally dead, nobody knows about them, and they have the Apple. A new age of assassins begins. …Or merely continues, as anyone who has played the games would tell you that the brotherhood is alive and kicking in the 21st Century, and these new assassins are merely joining in.

So yeah, that’s the movie. I’ve warmed up to it a tad as I read about the artistry behind it (the “leap of faith” stunts, the genuine wrist blades made by the special effects team, choosing to go for Spanish in scenes set in Spain instead of having everyone speak English). However, it’s still got quite a number of faults.

The mere concept of the Animus takes a while to
explain to someone discovering the franchise for the first
time. To be fair, it is made a lot more cinematic with
the crane-style version in the film.

As a film that’s genuinely part of the AC canon rather than just an adaptation, it had the very difficult task of pleasing fans of the franchise (as it’s a required watch in order to understand some of the plot threads that would come afterwards) while serving as a good introduction to the uninitiated. I can’t speak as the former, but I think everything could have been explained a little better for people unfamiliar with the franchise. Some parts of the film made little sense to me until I looked up some of the information. I assume the games have a lot more time to explain their concepts, giving several hours of gameplay each, and a lot of plot to put everything in place, more plot than a 2-hour film could give. Ubisoft sure likes to turn that story into a big puzzle, borderline an ARG, in which you need to play every game if you want to know the entire story. Hell, this movie doesn’t even come close to talking about Those Who Came Before, and by 2016, those were a huge part of the plot!

I think I would have liked more scenes with the other
descendants of assassins in the facility. Moussa was
a lot of fun, and his character gimmick of being into
stage magic wasn't explored nearly enough.

That said, I do think that Ubisoft and Twentieth Century Fox wanted to make a good product. The historical scenes set in Andalucia, Spain, are the best moments in the film. I forgot to mention him so far, but Javier Gutiérrez delivers a great performance as Torquemada; so does Hovik Keuchkerian, former Spanish boxing/kickboxing champion, as Ojeda. Of course, can’t go without mentioning Michael Fassbender having the dual role of Callum Lynch and Aguilar de Nerha. Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Irons fill the cast well, although I think Cotillard could have done with a bit more emotion. The action is great, and so is the cinematography.

Admittedly, the film focuses more on the modern day, with the scenes set in the past taking up 30 minutes, or roughly a third of the film. Opposite of the games, which take place almost entirely within the Animus, exploring historical eras. Not an issue to me, but for fans of the franchise, I can see why it’s annoying.

Very dark scenes + blurry special effects =
"What's going on?"

I did the test and watched this movie on the living room TV with my mother, who knew nothing about the franchise prior to watching the film; predictably, very little of the film made sense as explanations were insufficient. The biggest issue, however, is something I hadn’t paid attention to as I had only watched the film on a computer screen before; the movie is, visually, very dark. Most of the scenes are shrouded in darkness. I can imagine that it’s an artistic choice as assassins work in the shadows, but it made several scenes difficult to decipher. Sometimes, I almost had to squint to figure out what was going on. Scenes were shot in the dark, details were difficult to make out. It’s not helped by most of the CGI effects being blurry, whether they were Cal’s bleeding effect, or the holograms displaying around him while in the Animus. Again – artistic decision, but it’s not very pleasing to the eye.

It did make me want to play the games, at least...
Dammit Ubisoft, why must you be so rotten?

This movie did poorly enough in American markets to be considered a box-office bomb, but made back its production and advertisement budget and even made a small profit worldwide, in great part thanks to Chinese and Russian markets. It’s a decent but very average movie. I guess, regardless of whether you know the franchise, my best advice is to seek it out only if you really want to see it, either out of curiosity for Assassin’s Creed, or to fill in a few blanks on the franchise’s overarching storyline if you know the games. If your interest is small, or you really don't care for AC, you'd be best skipping it.

That’s been three movie adaptations of existing games… I think I’ll need something different to finish the month.