Justin Kurzel - Assassin’s Creed

Today marked the first time I saw Essie Davis on the big screen in Assassin’s Creed. Her husband, Justin Kurzel, was the director and Michael Fassbender played both main characters Callum Lynch and Aguilar de Nerha.

Callum lives in the present and is a criminal given the death penalty but later wakes up in a medical institution where he gets involved in Sophia Rikkin's (The daughter of a knights templar.) experiments where she tries to find a solution to all the violence in the world by collecting the assassins from the Middle Ages and using their genetic memory.

I have not played the video games and this might be why I found the plot very confusing. The part I did understand though felt rather intriguing and I think the film could have been longer so it had time to dvelve into more detail of the genetic memory and the film would also have gained a lot from exlplaining Sophia's reasearch and the reasons and logics behind her science and experimentations on people. The non-linear storytelling would also have benefitted if the film had more time I think. As it was now, it jumped far too quickly between different time periods and places and made it feel rather messy.

The visual style was beautiful and the actors were all rather good. It also had more women than I would have guessed and they were also quite diverse. I also thought Sophia was far more interesting than Callum. I would have liked to get to know much more of her background. The film does not really solve any plot points either and the ending feels made for a lot of sequels to follow it.

Essie Davis as Callum's mother

Cinema tickets

It is pretty obvious from this blog that I do love Essie Davis! But I am not sure I would have seen Assassin's Creed at the cinema if I had not had free tickets. If she would have been the lead, I would not have hesitated for a minute, but she is in it far too little for me to go straight to the movies to see it. I am glad I had a free ticket I needed to use before Wednesday and therefore got to see it and because of Essie I would probably have seen it at some point. Essie is in less then ten scenes and has only two or three lines in the entire film, so definitely too little Essie! It felt like a vaste of her talents by her husband, but I am still very thankful that they do both have their own careers away from each other. There are a lot of times in relationships between famous actors/actresses and filmmakers where this is not the case and you end up wondering if the actor/actress only got the role because she/he was sleeping with the director/producer/etc.



Picture from here and here.