Assassin's Creed shouldn't have been a movie it should be a TV series

Over the years, gaming fans have become all too familiar with the problems that arise when their favourite characters and worlds jump from the console to the silver screen.

Simply put, most video game movies are terrible.

The first, 1993's Super Mario Bros., might have been the worst place to start.Since the original games didn't have much of a plot to begin with, the filmmakers invented their own nonsensical, grungy take on the Nintendo favourite. And it was abysmal.

The new Assassin's Creed movie, based on Ubisoft's wildly popular series, suffers the opposite problem. There's too much story, world-building and complicated continuity to shoehorn into the one-and-a-half- to two-hour running time of a typicalmovie.

The end result is a film that frustratingly captures everything players love and hate about the series.

It also rather unintentionally makes the argument that games would be better served by television adaptations than cinematic ones.

Heavy plotting

The setup for the film will be familiar to fans of the game series, which debuted in 2007. At its heart is the centuries-long war between two secret societies: the Assassins, who value personal freedom; and the Templars, who yearn for control and order.

Texas death row convict Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) finds himself scurried away to a secret research laboratory by Abstergo Industries, a modern-day front for the Templars.

There, he meets Dr. Sophia Rikkin (Marion Cotillard), a scientist who hooks him up to The Animus, a mechanical construct that allows Cal to relive the life of his ancestor, the Assassin Aguilar de Nerha, who lived during the Spanish Inquisition.

By traipsing through Aguilar's memories, Rikkin hopes Cal will lead them to the location of the Apple of Eden, an ancient MacGuffin that can purportedly erase free will, thus reducing humanity to a docile race ripe for Templar rule.

Confused yet? Don't feel bad. The plot has befuddled gamers for nearly a decade, as successive titles added more characters and twists with no resolution in sight.

Waiting for the fun to start

The movie is more or less a retread of the first Assassin's Creed game, with Fassbender playing a marginally less infuriating version of the original Abstergo lab rat, Desmond Miles.

With such a complex mythology, it's no surprise that the actor made a point in promotional interviews of saying you don't need a degree in Creed history to appreciate the film.

"We knew that there's 100 million gamers that play out there, but we wanted to also please people who hadn't [played the game], so they can come to the theatre without having that back knowledge, and enjoy it all the same," he told Kelly Ripa in an interview on Live with Kelly.

To their credit, Ubisoft and director Justin Kurzel did what they could to boil down the series' backstory to its essentials. But it's still far, far too much. Kurzel spends what feels like the first half hour spelling out the Templars and Assassin's history and motivations, while the moviegoer waits for something anything to happen.

Those with no prior knowledge of the series will likely be bewildered by the litany of names and terms thrown at them. Cotillard and Jeremy Irons, who plays Rikken's hardline CEO father, often sound like they're reading the games' history from a Wikipedia page.

(Series veterans, on the other hand, will know exactly what everyone is talking about, snorting, "Oh, right that.")

Recreating gameplay

Many video game movies fail at capturing what drew players to games in the first place: the control they have over characters and the worlds they inhabit.

To its credit, the action scenes in Assassin's Creed evoke much of what makes the games exciting. Aguilar and his partner-in-assassination, Maria (Ariane Labed) dash, flip and roll across Madrid's rooftops in the same way a player would.

In fact, during some wider shots, I found myself surveying the architecture much the way I would in the game sizing up climbable scaffolding, safe points to jump from and attack routes that will get me through enemy goons.

The scenes are always cut far too short, though, as Cal and the audience is yanked back into the present-day drudgery of the Abstergo research lab.

HBO, Netflix should take note

Ubisoft's desire to ensure the film remains faithful to the source material is commendable. But the stories they seem to want to tell don't fit neatly into a feature-film format.

For example, viewers only get a glimpse of Callum Lynch's introduction to the Order. Similarly, Aguilar and Maria never get enough time to develop into characters of their own.

They're mere shadows compared to, say, Jacob and Evie Frye, the sibling vigilantes in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, the ninth title in the game series.

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But Syndicate takes anywhere from 20 to 40 hours to complete a running time closer to a season or two of television.

A Netflix or HBO show would have time and space to pepper in the requisite world-building while introducing characters and relationships worth caring about.

Perhaps, like the Apple of Eden itself, the vaunted "good video game movie" is simplytoo fruitless a goal to chase.