Assassin’s Creed arrives in theaters hoping to be a gateway drug to the vast world of media, comics, video games, and novels, surrounding the series. But if you only know it from the trailers, you might be confused as to what’s going on, especially since the Assassin’s Creed franchise is basically a hairsbreadth away from being Scientology. Yes, underneath the gleaming machines and psuedo-science, there’s a lot of ’70s cheese in this franchise.
Here are the basics. The Earth we’re on is much older than we think, and was originally populated by an alien race called the Isu who bred humans as basically the grunt labor of their society. You know how the Greeks believed that a bunch of gods lived up on a mountain and screwed with humans? Those were the Isu, according to the franchise. But a solar storm wiped them out, and set human society back thousands of years, leaving just a handful that remembered the truth.
That handful divided into two secret societies, which have secretly driven all of human history ever since. One, The Templars, seek to preserve humanity by taking complete control of it, often literally mind control, to unify it against a coming disaster. The other, the Assassins, think that human beings should be free to make their own decisions and tend to solve their disputes by dramatically swooping down on their targets from a roof and stabbing them in the neck. The Assassin’s Creed of the title is “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” So, the Assassins are really stabby hippies, and the Templars are the bad guy from Footloose with weapons built by ancient aliens, generally called Pieces of Eden because, as you’ve no doubt realized, subtlety is not a pillar of this franchise.
The problem, for both sides, is that human history is a very large canvas, and when you’re trying to find alien tech that was scattered by an apocalyptic disaster, you quickly learn most people don’t remember where it was or what it did, having more pressing con. This is where the modern day comes in. The Templars, in the guise of a megacorporation called Abstergo, finds people related to the Assassins of old and taps their “genetic memories” to get them to relive the past and try to figure out where the Assassins hid all the cool alien technology. This inevitably involves time periods that are fun to run around in, like the Italian Renaissance or the Victorian era, because stabbing somebody in 1957 Hoboken is just kind of depressing, really. It also inevitably involves elaborate puzzles and hidden tombs inside major landmarks, which evokes The Goonies more often than it really should.
The trade-off is that memories can “bleed,” transferring skills to the Assassin’s descendant. Think how Neo learned kung fu in The Matrix, except he picked it up from his great-great-great-great-great-granddad also knowing kung-fu instead of a computer teaching him. That would seem to be a rather severe flaw, in the sense that if you’re holding somebody captive, you’re teaching them how to kill you. But the Templars have pretty much run the world since Babylon and can’t kill a bunch of people whose primary fighting technique is “death parkour.” Depressingly, that the secret society that runs everything is rather bad at it seems pretty credible.
And that, in a nutshell, is that: Two secret societies, created at the beginning of human history, who know we were created by aliens and squabble over their technology, yet never seem to clue us in or have some archaeology student stumble over what amounts to a weapon of mass destruction. Yes, it is all rather silly, so we recommend you focus on the death parkour instead: That’s really what everyone shows up for anyway.
