Assassin’s Creed: The Movie Based on the Game Based on History

As I alluded to in my preceding game log, an Assassin’s Creed movie is actually being made. Ubisoft, who fought movie publishing houses to retain creative control over their franchise, started developing the project in 2012. The film stars Oscar-nominated Michael Fassbender (a producer on the project) and Oscar-winning Marion Cotillard and is directed by Justin Kerzel, who directed the most recent Macbeth film adaptation with Fassbender and Cotillard (Armitage). The plot is basically lifted from the games’ main protagonist, Desmond Miles, as a new character is captured by the sinister Abstergo Industries and becomes an assassin through exploring the memory of his ancestors (through DNA, technology, and whatever). But, that transplanted plot isn’t really important. What is important is that yet another video game movie is actually being released but this time during Christmas. Yes, Ubisoft seriously thinks a video game movie can actually compete with both a Star Wars and a Harry Potter spin-off during the holiday season. 

Perhaps, I should slow down on my knee-jerk skepticism. Not all movies adapted from video games have been flops. The Tomb Raider and Resident Evil movie franchises have each made hundreds of millions of dollars, about $400 million and about $500 million respectively (Hillier). Critics hailed the moderately successful Prince of Persia movie as “far from perfect, but fun to watch” and “a movie that knows exactly how dumb it is” (Rotten Tomatoes). However, these three movies deviated a great deal from their respective franchises. The Resident Evil created a new character for Milla Jovivich to play and storylines that had stuff very loosely relating to Raccoon City and somewhat referencing the games’ characters. According to game blogger Brenna Hillier, a video game movie wants “to wring a pretty penny out of a gaming property you need to shuck off most of the trappings of established narrative and personalities and focus instead on a few core takeaways (Hillier). Video game movies cannot rely on video games for a good story because video game narratives are: 1.) much longer than a movie narrator (8-10 hours for a typical FPS story v. 1.5-2 hours for a typical action movie); 2.) reliant on the opposite of the necessary passive watching required for movies: interactivity. 

Video games are meant to be played. Now, it didn’t take me the whole semester to discover this truth, but that statement needs to be emphasized here. Put another way, video game narratives are meant to be played, acted upon by a player who guides the actions in the digital world and fill the identity of a typically empty protagonist (like the sort-of British Lara Croft or completely silent Gordon Freeman) in action games. The game’s journey isn’t so much for the protagonist but for the player. The whole experience is designed for the player to move around, observe, and perform certain actions through an avatar. Movies take an audience member through a guided, pre-set series of events for a diegetic protagonist that the viewer cannot affect nor control. That is why videogames should not be made into movies, or if they are, the movie only resembles the game in name. A movie should never borrow a game’s narrative just because movie execs think the game’s brand is strong enough for them to plug mindlessly into a three-act plot structure without any extraordinary critical thought. That leaves us with abominations like the Super Mario Bros. movie or the Alone in the Dark movie that has a 1% score on Rotten Tomatoes (Rotten Tomatoes).

So, videogame narratives depend on player interaction over a long span of time. Movies depend on spectator compliance for around two hours at most now. Coincidentally, that’s about how much time I spent on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, which insists on forcing a player to be a spectator for the first two hours of the game. So, maybe I was wrong. Maybe Assassin’s Creed will be a good movie because those games have already tried so hard to be movies.  

Works Cited:

“Alone in the Dark.” Rotten Tomatoeshttps://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/alone_in_the_dark. Accessed 27 Nov. 2016.

Armitage, Hugh and Rosie Fletcher. “Assassin’s Creed movie: Everything you need to know about Michael Fassbender and the cast, spoilers, and release date.” Digital Spy, 27 Oct. 2016, http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/feature/a672940/assassins-creed-movie-everything-you-need-to-know-about-michael-fassbender-and-the-cast-spoilers-and-release-date/. Accessed 27 Nov. 2016.

Hillier, Brenna. “Metal Gear Solid and the gaming curse.” VG 24/7, 31 Aug. 2012, http://www.vg247.com/2012/08/31/metal-gear-solid-and-the-gaming-cinema-curse/. Accessed 27 Nov. 2016.

“Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.” Rotten Tomatoeshttps://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/prince_of_persia_sands_of_time/. Accessed 27 Nov. 2016.

On Games and Theatre

“Games are a kind of theater in which the audience is an actor and takes on a role—and experiences the circumstances and consequences of that role.” (Anthropy 20)

Throughout the semester, one aspect of videogames has struck me the most and really distinguishes games from any other medium: the power it gives the audience. In other art forms like television, cinema, or painting, the audience never performs any action beyond observation, except for a certain kind of theater known as “interactive” or “immersive theatre.” It’s a type of theater that actually makes the audience participate actively in theatrical spaces. The most famous contemporary example of this theater is Sleep No More, a production of Macbeth by the UK’s Punchdrunk theater collective. This version of Shakespeare’s Scottish play takes place at New York City’s McKittrick Hotel, a six-story where audience members physically inhabit and interact with the same space the actors are in. Journalist Scott Brown writes of the audience’s involvement in Sleep No More, “Sleep allows its ‘guests’ great freedom. Presented with a bone-white Venetian beak mask (the kind favored by plague doctors in the Renaissance), you’re invited to gawk, shame-free, at whatever you see, to rifle through drawers, files, Rolodexes, and even coffins. You and your fellow voyeurs, enskulled in your morbid headgear, quickly become part of the creepy scenery. More to the point, you’re a ghost. (N.B.: This doesn’t exempt you from actor contact — in fact, you’re practically guaranteed to be interfered with at some point in the approximately three hours it takes to survey the space and absorb the long arc of the story.) Fending for yourself in the fictional “McKittrick Hotel” (a pointed Vertigo reference that dizzy or claustrophobic types should take to heart before booking), you’re given the run of six misty, intricately detailed floors, with more than 100 rooms” (Brown). These rooms include “‘situations’: a man who may or may not be Duncan, right king of Scotland, being murdered in a sheikh’s tent. A gelid blonde who may or may not be Mrs. Danvers from Hitchcock’s Rebecca — here in loyal service to Lady Macbeth — spooning milky poison down the gullet of a soused, super-pregnant woman who very well might be Lady Macduff” (Brown). Sleep No More builds a world that immerses people fully in an expansive place, where story unfolds through exploration. The audience is no longer assembled of passive spectators but active, investigative witnesses. This type of theater engages audience members to explore and connect with an old story through a completely new environment unlike any other medium, except for videogames. This immersive theater seems (to me) to be a kin to videogames, a medium that also allows for audience members to explore, play, and connect with an environment. 

Shot of Sleep No More

That is, videogames could be a medium like immersive theater that engages and makes the audience active. I say this because in order for an audience member to become another actor, the audience member must have choice. In Sleep No More, the audience can choose to go whatever place they want, try to talk to whomever they want, and do whatever they want. Like the actors who are also making choices to play characters and do certain things on a “stage,” the audience unwittingly does the same thing and is forced to make purposeful choices on what to do and not to do. To relate this to Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, interactive theater does not take place in it nor a lot of other videogames. The games inhibit player’s choices to conform to a linear track on which to progress. Black Flag is more like a movie than a play in a hotel. 

Finally, the medium Assassin’s Creed deserves

To be sure, the player does have freedom and can take action within the world. This is still a digital play space where players can fight anyone they want (except for citizens, which prompts a fail screen), can climb buildings (except for buildings that don’t have any obvious spots you can grab on to), and can spend digital money on whatever (no exceptions). Yet, the game does not offer a lot of freedom to the player, insisting on rigid paths and linear tasks to a linear storyline. After the opening scene of fighting pirate ships that all exploded, my character swam in the water and was essentially presented a path straight to a beach. However, I wanted to swim back to the ship’s wreckage and around the ocean because I could so why not? I swam to these places but nothing really happened until I got to the beach where I was “supposed” to be. So why does the game present options of swimming around pirate ships and climbing buildings but really only rewards players for swimming to the “right” spot where the cutscene kicks in or the “right” buildings that I somehow can climb versus all the other ones? I’m not saying that every choice should be rewarded, but if you have and market a game as being an expansive game world, shouldn’t this game world include more than one set of action for actors? Can’t we choose where we want to be in this world as players instead of being forced down one path of cutscene after cutscene? I might as well watch a movie, instead of being an offered an illusion of theatrical choice. Or I’ll go to a hotel where people are putting on Macbeth, where I can do more interesting fictional things. 

Works Cited:

Anthropy, Anna. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. Seven Stories, 2012.

Brown, Scott. “Theater Review: The Freakily Immersive Experience of Sleep No More.” Vulture, 15 Apr. 2011, http://www.vulture.com/2011/04/theater_review_the_freakily_im.html. Accessed 23 Nov. 2016.

Fletcher, Rosie and Hugh Armitage. “Assassin’s Creed movie: Everything you need to know about Michael Fassbender and the cast, spoilers and release date.” Digital Spy, 27 Oct. 2016, http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/feature/a672940/assassins-creed-movie-everything-you-need-to-know-about-michael-fassbender-and-the-cast-spoilers-and-release-date/. Accessed 23 Nov. 2016.

Assassin’s Creed: Pirate Simulator

I started up this game of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, and I felt unsure. I was unsure of how this game would be after a four year hiatus from the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Would I get the same product I got time and time again from this franchise: a slightly different “cool” hooded protagonist with slightly different weapons in a slightly different plot loosely grounded in somewhat historically accurate characters? Probably. I knew what I would get when I played this game; this is a series whose successes are built on slight tweaks of a recycled formula. However, the location and characters would be brand new for me to free run tall buildings, assassinate nameless guards, and take in the virtual views of an old famous city. In a way, each Assassin’s Creed game is a mod of the previous one: changed visuals with mostly unchanged game mechanics.

(top: Assassin’s Creed III; bottom: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag)

Though with Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, the game doesn’t immediately place the player in an old city or futuristic hideaway. It immediately introduces us to our protagonist, Edward Kenway, who is a pirate because he wants to be free from an oppressive class-based economy and naval structure. The designers smartly encouraged me to align with this pirate character as soon as possible. Who doesn’t want to be a rebellious pirate? Then, the game cut to a battle at sea between pirate ships. I was suddenly firing cannons at 18th century ships and steering a pirate ship. Then, the ships exploded, and I was washed up on an island chasing an assassin, who I ended up murdering. I have to commend Ubisoft for knowing what gamers want out of Black Flag: to be a pirate and assassinate people as soon as possible. 

Yo-ho-ho

However, the new pirate pleasures do not really justify passing this game off as anything new. This begs the question of why these games keep getting made and bought? Why do people basically want a nicer version of a game they already have? I suppose it makes sense for players new to the franchise to play this game, but if I already have Assassin’s Creed II and Assassin’s Creed III, why do I need this game? Why don’t I just play those games again if I really want to instead of shilling another $60 to Ubisoft? Ultimately, I was unsure about playing Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag because I had hope amidst my cynicism. I had hope that this game could be potentially something different and interesting, especially after the series abandoned Desmond Miles’s weird alien-unveiling story arc. My hope was not really met; instead, I got the same game but with pirates. Don’t get me wrong, Caribbean pirates are awesome. Yet, even that different style choice is not new or fresh. It’s a safe bet on what the popular conscience deems cool. Which is all this game series will ever be: a series of safe bets siphoning ideas from popular culture and movies, inhibiting what could be a one-of-a-kind game experience. 

Who says pirates are overdone? Wait…

Images Cited:

Cloud_imperium. “Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag Review; ARRR !!!” Gamespot, 31 Jul. 2014, http://www.gamespot.com/assassins-creed-iv-black-flag/user-reviews/2200-12602699/.  Accessed 22 Nov. 2016.

“Featured Video.” Disneyhttp://pirates.disney.com/. Accessed 22 Nov. 2016.

“Screen 621262.” Assassin’s Creed III Gallery, gamershell.com, 8 Apr. 2012,http://www.gamershell.com/ps3/assassin_s_creed_iii/screenshots.html?id=621262. Accessed 22 Nov. 2016.

Usher, William. “Assassin’s Creed 4 PS4 Gameplay Trailer Seeks Out Hidden Treasure.” CinemaBlend, 2013, http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Assassin-Creed-4-PS4-Gameplay-Trailer-Seeks-Out-Hidden-Treasure-57742.html. Accessed 22 Nov. 2016.

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