Video game adaptations don’t have a great track record on the big screen. As superhero movies dominate the box office, Hollywood is still waiting to have a big breakout hit based on a video game property — and the creative team behind 20th Century Fox’s Assassin’s Creed is hoping this can be it.
It’s a storyline that borrows its influence directly from the premise of the Assassin’s Creed video game franchise, but Kurzel wanted the moviegoing experience to offer something new. “I was trying to bring a cinema to the game,” he explained during a visit to the film’s set in October. “I think the game is so cinematic and it is so extraordinary, and the visuals in the game are so striking. It was, ‘How do you embrace that and at the same time provide something different?’”
Said Fassbender, “We’re treating this as a cinematic experience as opposed to trying to bring a video game on screen.”
The solution was to stay true to what makes the Assassin’s Creed games such a hit, like the fight styles, while also elevating some of the elements that make them unique, like the concept of DNA memory. Seeing the missteps previous video game adaptations have made with heavy reliance on CGI, Kurzel opted to shoot real, impressive stunt sequences at real locations, making the parkour chase scenes play out on the tops of real buildings in Malta.
“Often when movies are made of video games, people don’t spend the money, they don’t spend the time because they go, ‘They’re gamers. Just do the game on screen and they’ll like it.’ But we really feel, since often those haven’t been very successful, that we had to step up,” said executive producer Pat Crowley. “We knew we had to spend money so that people wouldn’t feel like it was just a rip off of the game.”Fassbender was one of the first people to become attached to the movie, but it was Ubisoft’s pitch to him in 2011 and not his passion for the franchise that got him on board. In fact, the X-Men: Apocalypse star hadn’t even played the games before he said “yes” to producing and starring in the film. He connected with the themes at the core of the story, and during pre-production worked to develop the script, characters and story.
“I like the idea that the Templars and the Assassins, they both have their ethos and beliefs on the struggle over humanity, but both of them have contradictions within their ethos and their principles. They become hypocritical in their own right. It becomes a very gray area,” he said. “I thought if you could take something like DNA memory, which seems to be a plausible scientific theory that scientists are exploring today, and you can take that to a fantasy world, it will help the audience immerse themselves more into something fantastical there that is rooted in logic and actual real theory.”
Assassin’s Creed’s creative team understand that they walk a fine line with a movie based on a game: they both have to appease fans of the franchise while also making something that’s accessible to an audience that might not have any previous knowledge of the story. This is an origin movie that is set within Ubisoft’s established rules for Assassin’s Creed, but also doesn’t have any of the same characters or artifacts from previous games. (There already are plans for two more movies, the first of which was being developed while this movie was in production.)
Much of the focus made on making the world feel as real and, in the case of the 15th century sequences, as historically accurate as possible to showcase why bringing Assassin’s Creed to the big screen adds a new layer to the experience.
“Inherently, you think every gamer comes to the movie and they’re going to sit there if they’re an Assassin’s Creed fan, they’re going to sit down in their seat and they’re going to go, ‘This is never going to be good enough,’” said Crowley. “How will you please them? The only way to please them is to make them feel like you really care about their experience, and also give them something in which the next time they play the game after they see the movie, they understand the real world that it exists in.”
There are some big deviations from the games. Crowley said the movie will take place 65 percent in the present and 35 percent in the past, whereas the games are predominantly set in the past. As the recently released trailer also showed, the Animus looks a lot different in the film than it does in the game, a decision production designer Andy Nichols explained as “a more interesting departure from the game because you can’t just film someone twitching on a couch.”
But there are many more parts that are going to stay true to the spirit of the games, like the Leap of Faith at the end of the trailer and the incorporation of Eagle Vision. Said Nichols, “That plays a part of coming into and out of a regression in places. It gets used throughout the movie. … Birds and eagles are a constant presence, and certainly when some of the introductions to scenes are shot it’s from an eagle’s point of view.” There also will be Easter eggs from the game series scattered throughout the movie.
“It’s nice to have a fan base out there already, and hopefully their interested in seeing a cinematic experience as well as the interactive game experience,” Fassbender said. “There are certain things that we absolutely want to respect in the game, but we also want to bring new elements to the game. Of course the Ubisoft guys have been here and they’ve taken a look around the sets and have been, I think, pretty impressed with some of the ideas with the Animus, our concept of that to what it is in the game. It’s just that thing. This isn’t a video game that we’re making. We’re trying to make a cinematic experience, so there are new things that we have to introduce.”
Assassin’s Creed hits theaters on December 21st, 2016.
Source: http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/05/14/assassinas-creed-movie-creators-want-to-prove-to-fans-they-understand-the-game
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