AC movie trailer and video game based movies

[JUMBO PALACE]

You just can?t bring across the story/character that a videogame tells in 10, 20, 50 or even 100 hours of gameplay. If you want to squeeze all of this into 2-3h,

You can if it's Assassin's Creed /snarky/

OT: I dunno, I thought the trailer was alright. It does what it needs to do. Fassbender looks good in the roll and the action seemed faithful to the style of the games.

I have a really weird relationship with this franchise. The only games I really loved and thought were great were AC2, and AC4. I enjoyed AC1 but agreed with many of the criticisms levels against it. Brotherhood and Revelations were okay but you could see the games getting that Ubisoft bloat. AC3 was...AC3, and I didn't play Unity or Syndicate thanks to the poor performance for hte former and lukewarm reviews for the latter.

And yet, I still consider myself a fan of the franchise and I kind low-key root for it. It's kind of like Jesse Pinkman. I know it's only going to get worse but whenver I say a ray of sunshine I get all excited.

 

[happyninja42]

Ranting:
After watching the Trailer for the Assassins Creed Movie Im still upset. The trailer looks horrible, the dialogue in it was atrocious, the whole trailer looked like one of these forgettable B-movies that flood cinemas nowadays.

This kind of assumes that the story for AC is something above a B-movie. And honestly, it's not. It's a thinly veiled scifi premise, used as a plot device, to justify time hopping around history like the Magical School Bus, but with blood, murder and sex. There's nothing wrong with that, in fact I really enjoy it, as I'm a huge fan of the "genetic memory" trope in scifi, from my decades of reading Dune. But it's hardly top notch story telling. The future plot stuff was thin at best, basically there just as filler between major history segments. So if the future part in the Abstergo labs is lackluster in the movie...it's going to be a faithful translation of the game. And the historical parts were always about style over substance. Their outfits are just fucking impractical, but damn they look cool. Well, spot on for the movie again there. The action was unrealistic and over the top. Counter attack for the win, so 1 vs 30 = 1 wins. Well, the movie seems to be doing that too. Again, spot on translation.

Which brings me to the topic of movies based on videogames.
Im pretty sure that they are part of why videogames are often looked down on by people that don?t play, with good reason: I have so far not seen one acceptable movie video game adaptation.
You just can?t bring across the story/character that a videogame tells in 10, 20, 50 or even 100 hours of gameplay.

You are confusing playtime with storytime. If you ignored all of the side shit in AC, which is about 85% of it, and just focused on the story missions, you'd have probably 2-3 hours of stuff, directly related to the plot.

If you want to squeeze all of this into 2-3h, you are inevitably going to get something thats a filtrate lacking of all what made the game great.
You take away story development, the players bond to the character and the fun of the gameplay. Or of just messing around in open-world games (Which AC is great at).

Why would that be fun to watch? Watching Fassbender crawl around on every building, looking for flags and feathers, and shanty note sheets? You seriously want to see a movie about that?! That was game padding, more padding then in a 12 year old girl's bra! Who wants a movie that is that true to the source material of AC? For one, it would be a TV series, and it would be mostly just watching a guy in awkward clothing, parkouring around rooftops, picking up random objects that ultimately serve no purpose. Sorry, I think I'll pass. xD

Bottom line, I think the movie has done what it needed to do. Trim down all the bloated fat and gristle of the AC game line, and focused just on the plot. There is a decent enough premise there to make for a decent B scifi movie, and if it's good enough, I'd be up for more. The plot itself is good, but it's all in the execution of it.

 

[Beliyal]

I thought the trailer was really good. Agreed on the music though, doesn't really fit, but I didn't find it that distracting.

Assassin's Creed has a setting interesting enough to make it a movie, without relying on the games too much. Which seems it's exactly what they did. Took the interesting premise and imagery and are inventing new characters and stories in the universe. I think this movie might fare much better than video game movies usually do for this reason.

One of the issues with video game movies is that they try too hard to take as many elements from the video games as possible, but those elements often don't work in a different medium. There's lots of characters that don't really have much dialogue or meaningful dialogue, but that can't work in movies so they give them stuff to say, but it changes their character and the overall tone. Video game stories and plots are often terrible as well, which considerably hampers adaptations that try to stay close to the source material. Video games also have a lot of action, but a movie can't rely on that so much. The action in the adaptation then either seems out of place and forced or is different from how it works in the game, which appeals to no one.

AC movie looks like it might avoid these issues. The setting is here (which is arguably the most compelling thing about AC - the whole idea of it), but the characters and the plot are new so the filmmakers had free reign to invent something movie-specific that will work in the medium. Parkour and fights seem as they would in any historical fantasy movie, so that's fine and it doesn't look like the past setting will be prevalent.

The movie could still be shit, but I believe it has much more potential that video game movies usually have.