By Travis Johnson
Here at last is our first decent look at Assassin’s Creed, the upcoming big screen adaptation of the Ubisoft video game series, directed by Australian Justin Kurzel.
Fans of the game series will be on familiar ground here, and the film looks to be surprisingly faithful to the source material. Michael Fassbender is both modern day protagonist Callum Lynch and his ancestor, the assassin Aguilar, the pair linked by the science-y hokum of genetic memory. Lynch finds himself dragged into a secret war between the Assassins (good guys) and the Templars (bad guys), and it’s a fair bet that we’ll be spending more time watching Fassbender gavotte and garotte his way around medieval Spain than looking confused while Marion Cotillard explains the plot to him.
The whole thing looks great and Kurzel, who gave us the great Snowtown and the less great Macbeth shows an impressive facility for action, which is reassuring. Could this be the fabled Video Game Movie that Is Not Terrible? we get to find out on January 1, 2017. In the meantime, check out the new poster:
