Movie Month: Ralph Breaks The Internet (Part 2)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

If you ask me, this new format is working pretty well so far.

What Is This “Real Life” You Speak Of?

"Are we going to find the wheel here? Looks like there
are millions of items in this place!"

Ralph and Vanellope have arrived at eBay, and set about finding the Sugar Rush steering Wheel among the millions of items on the site. Checking some of the auctions around them, the two don’t seem to understand how it works. The situation presented in the film leads to a lot of funny “fish out of water” moments as these two arcade characters have run-ins with real life, in ways neither of them could have expected. They’re still game characters at their core, so they struggle to understand that some things aren’t games. I actually like this particular aspect of the film: That they’re out of their element and on a mission in a world they struggle to understand since it’s so different from their own.

"Say the biggest number you can think of?
Okay... One billion!"

The two get to the steering wheel, currently on sale at 275$, with a bidder on the scene. They try to figure out how this “game” works, and decide it’s just about saying the biggest number to win. Of course, there’s only 30 seconds left at the auction, because we need that good drama. The heroes start bidding against the user, then outbid him, then keep pumping up the number to ridiculous heights. How ridiculous? 27,001.00$. That ridiculous enough for ya?

Both Wreck-It Ralph movies can be summed up as "Ralph
makes a mistake, then makes everything worse, and
worse, and then he has to undo all of those mistakes."

Sure, they celebrate, but wait till they get to the cash register. The user who wanted the steering wheel walks away, his head hung low. Him not getting the wheel probably means there’s a Sugar Rush cabinet out there about to get unplugged due to being unplayable, for lack of wheel. But who cares about those, amirite?

The cashier lady has no chill whatsoever.
I've been a cashier. I can't blame her.

Ralph and Vanellope get to the "cash register" and are told that they have to pay. With real-life money. They don’t have a credit card! They don’t have any alternate ways to pay, either! (Though we get some foreshadowing when the “cashier” mentions Buzzzybucks.) They’re given a window of 24 hours to pay or they lose the item…

All seems lost, until Ralph remembers one of the pop-ups at the entrance to eBay, who said something about earning money by playing video games.

(Oh, by the way, on a completely unrelated side-note: Thank you very much, Disney (and Pixar), for your DVDs in the 2010s containing some sort of anti-piracy DRM that causes movies to skip and lag when watched on software like VLC Media Player. It’s very awesome to have the movie stop for a couple seconds every once in a while and then skip where it was getting to. /sarcasm because no, it’s awful, and Disney, I know you don’t want your movies copied, but for the love of Christ, find a different program that will protect your movies without killing off any enjoyment for those who watch films on the computer! Makes it Hell for me when I want to take screenshots for this review!)

Those Darn Pop-Ups!

No, don't! He probably has viruses!

The buddies go back and find the pop-up guy. He’s easy to spot; in a sea of programs on the Internet who look like cartoony humans in a single color all over, he’s the only one with clothes that make him look like a complete character. He has just been thrown to the ground by a pop-up blocker from a smart Internet user. He takes them in his own browser, in-universe a car that’s seen better days, and takes them beneath the bustling world of the Web.

Oh yeah, this place totally says "trustworthy".

His website is small, represented by a trailer. The implication is that he lives a bit into illegality, hidden below everything else. But it's not the Deep Web; If it were, it wouldn’t be accessible through a pop-up advertisement. The pop-up guy’s name is Spamley (Bill Hader), and he has a “reputable” business (big damned air quotes there!) in which he offers people to earn real-life money for grabbing rare items in online games. Spamley’s assistant Gord, a creepy round thing in a cotton shirt, hands them some examples: An amulet for 3$, a necklace for 5$, some gold shoes for 15$. I have to ask, is this really a thing? Are there spam websites that offer this service?

Gord is creepy as Heck.

If Ralph and Vanellope choose to go that route, they’ll need to gather either 9001 amulets, 5401 hammers or 1801 pairs of golden shoes. They only have 24 hours, so… yeah, no. Vanellope brings this up, so Spamley reveals one of the most expensive items he’s been asked for: The car used by Shank, a highly-important NPC, in the online game Slaughter Race. It goes for 40,000$. Holy crap, that’s more than twice the worth of my real-life car! Well, it’s not like the two have a choice, right?

Oh, they have no idea what they're getting themselves into.

Bless Spamley, he’s a likeable character (and he gets more screentime than other characters who’d deserve it more). He knows he’s shady, but he’s honest about being shady, and even warns Ralph and Vanellope on how dangerous it will be to steal Shank’s car. Then again, if you try to humanize (or anthropomorphize) something as annoying as pop-up advertisements, you’re fighting a losing battle. There will always be that nagging impression that under the nice front, the guy is doing something really wrong. It’s like being best drinking buddies with a guy who nonchalantly admits to defrauding the bank.

This Place Called Slaughter Race

A fast food place in a GTA-like game? You know what's
coming. "I'll have two number 9s..."

Cut to Slaughter Race. How to describe this game… Hm… it definitely takes inspiration from Grand Theft Auto. However, the focus seems to be on street racing, so… Ubisoft’s The Crew? Yet, there seems to be an additional edge of insanity to the whole thing, a pinch of Saints Row. I guess the closest game in tone would be Twisted Metal. I’ll say, gutsy of Disney to feature something that comes so close to the edge of PG-13 in one of their animated films.

The arcade characters walk around, and Ralph immediately fears for his friend’s safety. He can survive heavy damage; she can’t. Between cars flipping upside-down, explosions all over the place, a higher rate of criminality than in any real-life location, not to mention the angry dogs and even friggin’ SHARKS in the sewers, how can he NOT be worried?

Is the clown makeup a reference to Payday 2?

They find Shank’s car in a warehouse. Unfortunately for them, two players in typical adult game avatars have showed up, ready to take the car after 31 hours of non-stop gaming. …Okay, no, that’s not recommendable. I remember how the Nicelanders were animated in the previous film, their stilted movements reminiscent of their limited 8bit animation on the arcade cabinet screen. The player characters we see in Slaughter Race are similar, moving in erratic ways and having quick animations for actions such as pulling out a weapon. Oh, and don’t forget the usernames: DirtySocks537 and BabeRaham_Linkin. Well, those two were classy enough to not slip in a 69 or a 420 in there.

About to get WASTED.

You know she's business; she has her own title card.

However, before those players can come closer to Shank’s car, they’re ambushed by the Queen of the Road herself and her gang. The players don’t even get to say a thing before getting roasted by Pyro, the guy in Shank’s team who wields dual flamethrowers. After the corpses vanish from the warehouse to respawn who knows where, the gang has a sincere and friendly talk over their task in the game, and whether they’re making things unfairly hard for players.

Oh, I want to debate this, that’s been a long time coming.

Might as well use this to present the team.
On the left, Shank, on the right, Pyro...

Left to right: Felony, Little Debbie, and Butcher Boy.
I'm sensing a theme.

Shank’s friends argue that the players they just unceremoniously fried like chickens had worked really hard to get there and deserved the reward, or at least something, in return. If someone is willing to pay 40K$ of real-life money to get that car, it must be one-of-a-kind and borderline impossible to steal, yes. Shank, in return, argues that they can’t just let the players win, as there wouldn’t be a lesson in this sort of victory; and then adds that if the game had no challenge, it would be boring.

No. You’re wrong, Shank, and this has bothered me ever since I first saw this movie. You treat the players like they didn’t put in the effort to steal your car. They did; DirtySocks537 specifically said they gamed for 31 hours non-stop, which is some crazy dedication; it's also very unhealthy. In a multiplayer game, it sounds like your car is an item that players can only reach if they put in the work and went through damn near everything else the game contains. Yes, there has to be a challenge. Especially when there’s so much competition between players, precisely to get to that damn car.

Oh, this scene annoys me so much...

But! You and your gang didn’t even give them a fighting chance in this encounter; you ambushed them and killed them, right then and there. They didn't even take a step forward, and Fwoom! Game Over, by flamethrower to the face! How’s that fair? How can you talk about giving a challenge if you don’t even play by the rules that you’re so willing to set? Also, as a later line confirms, nobody has ever succeeded in stealing that car, and I assume that’s because you won’t play fair to anyone who comes close. Your speech does NOT work, Shank.

And it annoyed me because Shank is depicted like a reasonable figure in the film, but this makes her sound like a complete hypocrite. And part of the conflict in the film revolves around her! Oh yeah, forgot to mention that – Shank is voiced by Gal Gadot, and is given the “Simpsons Guest Star” treatment; so important, it’s like the story bows down to her words and whims when she appears. She’s a pretty good character after this scene, but this was a very bad first impression.

Vanellope finding out what it's like to drive something
really close to a real car. Bye bye candy karts!

Ace driver VS ace driver.

Ralph and Vanellope devise a plan to steam Shank’s car. Ralph distracts the gang with a baloney complaint while Vanellope climbs into the car and takes off with it, hitting Ralph on her way out to get him aboard. Hey, careful Ralph! Watch the paintjob, if you want that 40K! Shank gives chase in the first car she can find, with her gang following. The candy princess realizes that she loves driving around that world – she’s not bound by tracks, she can choose where she goes, she has no idea what will happen next! Shank also takes a liking to this chase, she’s never been challenged like this before!

Hollywood Doesn’t Understand Video-Sharing Sites And Online Monetization

Ralph is about to make a fool of himself, but it's for a
friend. He won't mind at all.

In spite of pulling some amazing stunts, Vanellope isn’t able to drive out of the game in time, as Shank’s team block the way out with a school bus. Ralph explains the situation to Shank but devolves into inelegant sobbing. That’s enough to convince Shank; she won’t let them have the car, but she will help them. She gets her friend Pyro to blow hot air in Ralph’s face and records him while he says his trademark “I’m gonna wreck it!”

Be thankful I chose this one, I could have picked a
screenshot much uglier than that.

She then uploads it to BuzzzTube. That video-sharing website is huge in this universe, much bigger than YouTube. (Allow me to weep in memory of all the video-sharing websites that had to shut down due to YouTube’s omnipresence on the market, with no real competition as a result.) Shank tells them that it’s possible to make a lot of money with viral videos online, and that she knows the head algorithm of BuzzzTube, who’s named Yesss. As Shank and her crew leave, she invites Vanellope to come back for a rematch someday.

Oh, and YouTube is two doors down, but nobody cares.

Looks like Vanellope has a new hero! But Ralph doesn’t trust her. He wants to go back to Spamley, but an actual eboy (representing notifications from ebay) shows up to tell him that there’s only eight hours left on the timer; if they haven’t paid in eight hours, bye bye wheel. A reluctant Ralph thus follows his friend to BuzzzTube. The place looks like a nightclub with screens all over the place showing the most popular videos of the moment. Ralph’s air-to-the-face video is…

I'm a bit glad for this change of color to predominant
purples. The yellow tint in Slaughter Race was getting
a bit too much.

No, wait, that’s not right. That video was made, what, an hour ago, at most? And apparently, it already has 26 million views and received over 1,312,000 hearts. Viral videos don’t get so high so fast. It doesn’t work like that. Before it gets big, a viral video has a humble start, then it spreads due to word-of-mouth and reposts of the link, until it eventually reaches a meme status. The community takes it and rolls with it, and shares it further, and that’s how viral videos end up with millions of views. This takes MUCH longer than an hour. Or eight.

Our stars get free drinks.
They don't visit very often, after all.

Like all denizens of the Web who are programs, the algorithm Yesss (Taraji P. Hansen) has a predominant color; she’s blue. Da ba dee da ba dye. She’s also constantly looking for the next big thing, but can’t find anything interesting. Hey Yesss! Can you tell your buddy, YouTube’s content algorithm, to stop recommending conspiracy theory videos to people? That’d be nice. She’s at first dismissive of that big guy and the girl with candy in her hair who just walked into her office, until she’s told that the big guy is in a BuzzzTube video that’s gathered over a million hearts. Now she’s treating him like a star!

"Here, have some free hearts! It's on the house."

Yesss explains that, in BuzzzTube’s system, the hearts a video gets are turned into money. Let’s compare with YouTube, shall we? Content producers on YouTube make money on their videos by monetizing them, which means including advertisements before or during the video. In all fairness, they can still be punished by YouTube’s algorithm pushing their videos out of people's recommendations, which makes monetization a problem. That’s why most content creators have turned to Patreon in order to receive a constant stream of revenue from fans willingly paying them, as it’s a more stable way to earn money through content production. Now, if YouTube didn’t change its goddamn rules every year, maybe it’d be easier to earn a decent living through it! And yes, there’s also the issue of ad blockers. Recently, you might have noticed content creators having paid sponsorships, which involves them slipping an ad directly into their video, so it’ll slip past ad blockers. There’s a reason Raid Shadow Legends has become a meme. These sponsorships are sufficiently lucrative that many creators will jump at the opportunity to have them. Oh, and a YouTube video’s thumb-ups and thumb-downs have absolutely nothing to do with monetization.

"I hope you've got energy, because you're about to make
dozens of videos in a very short timespan."

BuzzzTube seems to be a platform for short and simple content, or at least this seems to be what’s pushed forward the most. BuzzzTube relies entirely on a video’s hearts (its Likes) for monetization. It doesn’t seem to have a thumb down (or Dislike) option, either. Much like YouTube, videos have a comments section in which people can discuss. This is the only place where viewers can voice their discontent with a video. Do you know why YouTube doesn’t monetize videos based on thumb-ups? Because the number of people leaving thumb-ups is a small portion of all the viewers. It’s also very easy to game the system and have lots of people massively thumb-down videos out of spite. Monetizing videos from Likes wouldn't be a viable idea.

tl;dr BuzzzTube’s system sucks, and is proof that Hollywood doesn’t understand how viral content and online video monetization work.

Yesss hands Ralph and Vanellope little portable computers that double as phones; these things also show that Ralph’s video has earned him 43$. Encouraging, but not enough. Let’s calculate! This is about to get nerdy.

Ralph’s 43.00$ comes from a video that had gathered, at that moment, over 1,312,000 hearts. Dividing the latter by the former to get an approximate hearts-to-cents ratio, it means that Ralph earns roughly one cent for every 305 hearts he got on a video.

That video also had 26,240,742 views at that moment. Meaning that roughly 4.99% of viewers leave a heart on a video, or almost 1 out of 20.

In order to earn 27001$ out of this, Ralph needs to obtain 823,867,689 hearts. You’ve read that right; hundreds of millions. Taking into account that 1 person out of 20 leaves a heart, it means that his videos would need to accumulate a total of… 16,509,909,120 views. Or, in short, over 16.5 billion views.

Oh, and like I said; this would have to be done in less than 8 HOURS.

Yesss's assistant showing Ralph a "taste"...
...of his near future.

This part has been way too long, so I’m gonna end here: The duo explains that they need to collect 27,001$. Yesss says that Ralph’s video is already passé, so Ralph decides he’s gonna copy everything that’s popular, do every meme, every challenge, every single thing that’s ever been popular on the platform, to gather the hearts and, thus, the money. Yesss decides to help him with her… studio, I guess? And her army of pop-up advertisements redirecting everyone on the Internet to Ralph’s videos.

To Part 3!

Movie Month: Ralph Breaks the Internet (Part 1)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 

Finally, a review this month for a movie that is about video games, without being an adaptation of an existing series!

That titlecard was fun to make back in 2015.

I reviewed the original Wreck-It Ralph in 2015. I never thought, back in 2012, that Disney would make one of the better video game movies out there. I remember praising it quite a bit during my three-part review. It had the right amount of comedy, drama, intrigue. The characters played off of each other perfectly. The villain was great, everything paid off. I personally think it’s on its way to become a classic. If you haven’t seen it, look it up on Disney+, you won’t regret it.

There are, indeed, very few sequels on this list. That's
because the bad (read: DTV) ones are swept under the rug,
like a shameful reminder of days gone.

Disney dabbled in sequels before, However, most sequels to their famous animated films weren’t released in theaters, and went directly to home media, be it video or DVD. Usually, they were of pretty poor quality, with animation far weaker than the movie they followed up on. There were some direct-to-video (DTV) sequels that turned out better than expected, but the vast majority of them was… well, my overly-positive self hesitates to call them garbage, but if you’ve ever watched The Return of Jafar after seeing Aladdin, then you know what disappointment is. The time of direct-to-video sequels is long gone for Disney; nowadays, they prefer to put together a live-action version of one of their classics, even if those inevitably turn out weaker than the animated originals!

Ralph Breaks the Internet was the first recent Disney property to get a sequel, and a full-budget one at that. This film is considered a full part of the Disney canon, unlike the cheaper DTV films, and is only the fifth sequel to have that honor. I think it was meant as a sort of testing ground, a way to judge on the interest for sequels, seeing as other recent properties had sequels in the works (Frozen II came out last year, and there’s allegedly a sequel to Zootopia in production).

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.