Separated by time, a new pair of stills have surfaced for Ubisoft and New Regency’s live-action Assassin’s Creed movie, featuring Michael Fassbenders past and present.
The first of which finds a battle-ready Fassbender in 15th century Spain, as he locks horns with pawns of the Knights Templar. In this timeline, he’ll be portraying Aguilar de Nerha, a deadly assassin capable of crippling an entire empire from the shadows. On the other hand, the second still sees the actor in shackles as Callum Lynch, escorted to what we assume to be a testing lab deep within the bowels of the nefarious Abstergo Industries.
Now, you may be wondering how those seemingly disparate timelines intertwine. Well, in the Assassin’s Creed video game franchise, a device known as the Animus enables users to unlock genetic memories, essentially opening up entire sequences of their ancestors and thus allowing them to experience the past.
[zerg]And so, in the film, Callum discovers he is “a descendant of the secret Assassins society through unlocked genetic memories that allow him to relive the adventures of his ancestor, Aguilar, in 15th Century Spain. After gaining incredible knowledge and skills he’s poised to take on the oppressive Knights Templar in the present day.”
It’s a MacGuffin if ever there was one, but so long as Ubisoft’s feature film is marketed correctly – we’re still waiting on that first trailer, mind you – we imagine audiences won’t have too much trouble wrapping their heads around the sudden jumps in location.
Keen to spin out a bona fide franchise, Assassin’s Creed dives into theaters in time for December 21. Marion Cotillard, Ariane Labed, Michael K. Williams, Jeremy Irons and Brendan Gleeson round out the starry ensemble.
