Adaptation can be a tricky thing. What works in one medium doesn’t necessarily do so well in another. When making a movie based on a game, moviemakers have to consider how to make it meet the demands of a film, and this often results in changes to the source material. One change made for the Assassin’s Creed movie was the design of the Animus, the device which let the main characters explore his ancestors’ memories. The movie changed up quite a few aspects about how the device operated, and might have made it even better than the one in the game in the process.
The way the Animus works in the Assassin’s Creed games is simple: it’s virtual reality. The main character of the game lies or sits on a device which feeds their ancestors’ memories directly into their brain. The Animus of the Assassin’s Creed movie on the other hand, is closer to augmented reality. Like its source material, the device reads its user’s genetic memory, but unlike the game version it projects those memories around the user with lights and holograms. This is complemented by a giant claw arm which allows the user to move freely around the environments they are experiencing through the projections.
For what it does in the games it came from, the original Animus is fine. It essentially acts as a plot framing device for the level select screen, and making it more complicated than a bed or a chair would have been a needless use of resources by the developers. The movie however, as a movie has different needs which the original Animus just doesn’t meet.
For starters, it isn’t especially original. The movie needs to establish its own identity to separate it from its many predecessors which have also handled similar subject matter. Just by moving away from the virtual reality bed of the original game, the Assassin’s Creed movie did something to make itself stand out from a crowd of movies, The Matrix being the most obvious one to come to mind.
The original Animus also isn’t very engaging for the purposes of a film. When the characters enter the worlds it recreates in the games, it’s a simple matter of lying/sitting down and booting up an interface. That’s fine for a game, but the film opted to be much more dynamic. The audience is shown several interfaces come to light. The lights are raised, the holograms are put into place by the smoke, and the giant claw locks the main character (Callum “Cal” Lynch”) into position. There is a lot of movement going on, and it all builds suspense so that when Cal does start to experience his ancestor’s life, it feels like a huge, dramatic moment.
There’s an often quoted rule in storytelling; show don’t tell, and the way which the movie presents its central device allows it to do so in multiple ways. Firstly, the reason Cal is being put through the device at all is so that his captors (the Abstergo Foundation) can use them to learn the location of the film’s McGuffin. Bringing the past to life around the characters instead of putting them “into” the past, doesn’t just show us Cal experiencing those memories. It also shows us how the scientists behind them observing him do so, in a way that is far more engaging than having Marion Cotillard staring at a screen.
Secondly, it shows the audience just how important the central concept of “synchronization” is. In the games, synchronization is just the in-universe way of explaining the health meter. But the movie takes the concept and runs with it. Rather than just telling the audience that it’s important that Cal’s actions mirror those of Aguilar de Nerha, the ancestor whose life he’s reliving, it shows us why that is a big deal and how hard it is for the former to become attuned to the movements of the latter. It takes an off hand mechanic explanation and turns it into a crucial part of the Cal’s journey.
Finally, it helps justify how Cal is able to take all the skills which he has learned from Aguila and use them outside of the Animus. Granted, it wasn’t exactly a leap in logic when the games explained that enough exposure to the machine granted Desmond Miles with the very skills he had been displaying while using it, but the way it is designed in the movie makes it feel earned. To reiterate, because the audience is shown Cal physically making all the same runs, jumps, and combat manoeuvres that Aguila was capable of, it feels like something of a culmination when he is able to replicate those feats in the “real world”. Why wouldn’t he be able to do those things when he’s being doing them for most of the movie up to that point anyway?
When adapting a game to a movie, it is important to think the why of what it is being made as much as the what. The Animus in the Assassin’s Creed series is just a series of functions, and the movie could have easily replicated them without much cost. Instead the people behind the film remade the series’ central conceit to suit their needs. As a result they made something with its own unique energy. Something exciting which propels the movie forward and considers the quirks of its source material rather than being content to simply accept that material at face value. Regardless of how well the movie as a whole ultimately turned out, the Animus is the result of very creative thinking, and it leaves its own mark just as much as it explores the world created by the video games.
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