Assassin’s Creed First Look is a Tale of Two Michael Fassbenders

Empire has debuted two new stills from director Justin Kurzel’s adaptation of the video game franchise Assassin’s Creed, starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. If that trio of names sounds familiar, it’s because all three teamed up for this past years Macbeth as well. Now Kurzel is giving the wildly popular video game series the movie treatment and these stills look pretty cool.

If you’re not familiar with the series, it basically goes like this: there once was a super secret ancient league of assassins that was always at war with the Knights Templar. Fast-forward to present day and the Knights Templar still exists and they’re really, really bad. Uh oh! So in order to defeat them, the present-day ancestors of the assassins must go back in time using a VR machine called the Animus in order to figure out how to defeat the present-day Knights Templar. Or something like that.

In the stills we see Fassbender as both Aguilar, a 15^th-century assassin, and his modern-day ancestral counterpart Callum Lynch. Interestingly, both Aguilar and Callum are locked up; Aguilar dons black manacles while Callum is sitting in a cell as a prisoner but it’s not revealed why for either character.

What we do know is that this is a video game adaptation and while the source material is admittedly pretty damn cool with a lot of big ideas and thrilling action, great video game adaptations are few and far between—even good ones. You only have to go back a decade to find the remains of so many failures like Max Payne, Doom, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and Hitman.

I want to root for this one considering the names behind it and their previous picture together. Cotillard and Fassbender are exceptional talents and Kurzel made a damn fine adaptation of “Macbeth” with them. But while he may have captured Shakespearean history well there, could video game history repeat itself here? Let’s hope not. The Assassin’s Creed franchise practically begs to be adapted with its intriguing high concept, stealth and action, and dual timeline. With those elements going for it, as well as solid leads and a promising director, Assassin’s Creed may be the first to slice the trend of video game movies like a dagger. We’ll find out for sure when it hits theaters December 21st, 2016.