Adaptation

I've written before about adapting movies out of books, and why as a writer it is something that I am both wary of and would enjoy to see happen to one of my pieces. However, books aren't the only thing that get adapted into movies - we just talk about that more because there's a better chance of it going well. Video games can also be made into movies, though they have a long standing history of being terrible, with extremely few exceptions. And more unfortunate than that, even as video games become more cinematic and story driven, turning them into movies still has not gone smoothly.

I mention this because I just got back from seeing the Assassin's Creed movie. I'm a fan of the games, though it's certainly not my favorite franchise and I will freely recognize that there are many things wrong with the games. However, as a whole, they are very good games, and I always look forward to trying out the new one when it releases - even if at times I have to put them down for extended periods of time before I can return and finish them. The fact that they are so story driven and grounded in history made me excited for the possibility of how the movie might go, though I was extremely wary going in. And while I wouldn't say the movie was bad, it certainly wasn't good either.

There are a number of reasons for this, though the one that stands out to me is the dialogue, and how they tried to force things from the games into it. The dialogue wasn't great to begin with, but there were times when it hard cut from actually interesting and entertaining action scenes to a character verbatim stating the name of a gameplay mechanic (one which, I feel I should mention, was never actually mentioned outside of tooltips in the games) before hard cutting back to the action. It didn't add anything. It didn't even make sense. The big one for me was when the character takes a leap of faith off of a bridge, and the scientist it hard cuts to literally just says "Leap of faith." They could have said "They did a leap of faith," or "They actually managed the leap of faith," both of which would have made contextual sense and been an actual sentence. But no. They just name the mechanic and hard cut back.

I get that when making movies like this you don't want to alienate the original audience. You want to make call backs to what made the games good. I get that, I really do. But this was absolutely not the way to do that. There's a reason "show don't tell" is a saying. Hell, even a casual viewer who had never played the games before would have called what he did a leap of faith. That's a concept that exists naturally. You don't have to call it out like it's some mystical, unheard of thing. Put some faith in your audience, or else you're just pandering and failing.