9 Movie Spoilers We Didn’t Know Last Week (May 16th)
4. This Is What Happens In Assassin's Creed's First Act
The first 20-or-so minutes of Assassin's Creed were shown to select members of the press this week, and extensive reports have since emerged.
The film opens with a 10-year-old Callum Lynch (the movie's protagonist) coming home to find his mother murdered by his father, who has a full beard, cloaked jacket and blades hanging from his wrists, just like so many of the video game series' characters. He then tells his son, "Your blood is not your own, Callum."
After Callum's father goes outside to contend with a fleet of armed men, we cut to 28 years later, where Callum (now played by Michael Fassbender) is in prison. Jeremy Irons' Alan Rikkin, a honcho at Abstergo, is on the TV talking about isolating the gene which causes violence, before we learn that Callum's life has been a mess since his mother's death, and he is in jail for beating a man to death five years ago.
Callum is executed via lethal injection as Marion Cotillard's Dr. Sophia Rikkin looks on, but he wakes up sometime later in a hospital, where Sophia explains that he was given a toxin to approximate death, and the outside world assumes he is in fact dead.
Callum then tries to flee, running past random people in the hallway (including a young girl who echoes what Callum's father said 28 years earlier) and eventually ending up in what resembles a garden. This hospital it actually in the side of a mountain in Madrid.
He then meets fellow patient Moussa (Michael K. Williams), before Sophia explains that he is part of an effort to improve humanity. Moussa encourages him to jump from the side of the mountain to escape, but Callum stands down and is tranquilised. Sophia then says that her father Alan is getting in the way of her work's progress, and the last thing heard is, "Prepare the animus."
Sure, it's a fair leap from the source material, but perhaps in not so desperately clinging to every word of the game, this could end up being the first truly great video game movie. We'll have to wait and see.