【Watch Hana ni Keda Mono: Second Season Online】

For a movie based on Watch Hana ni Keda Mono: Second Season Onlinea video game franchise, Assassin’s Creedhas plenty of moral complexity."Basically for the audience, they can't sit back and go, ‘OK, well we know this is the good camp and this is the bad camp,” Michael Fassbender told Mashable.

This time, the actor, who has played Steve Jobs, Macbeth and Magneto, takes on the role of a 15th-century assassin. The material is also taken seriously by Australian director Justin Kurzel, who shunned green screens and shot on-location as often as possible to give it a realistic feel.

It's all in pursuit of expressing the very human longing for power.

SEE ALSO: Assassin's Creed VR experience gives us a taste of cinema to come

Using the original game as a springboard for the film's premise, Assassin's Creedcentres on the centuries-old battle between a secret sect of assassins, who honour free will, and the Knights Templar, who seek to control the human race.

Fassbender's character survives death row and wakes up in a lab where a scientist (Marion Cotillard) sends him back in time -- via DNA memory and some trippy VR machine -- to access the secrets of his Spanish ancestor, a bad-ass assassin.

A thirst for power, warring ideologies plus a call to listen to one's inner voice. Sound familiar? Of course it does; it's the basis of analogous moral tales from everyone from J.R.R. Tolkien to George Lucas. But just like real life, Kurzel's film is far from black and white. Fassbender and Marion Cotillard agree.

Cotillard sees the tension between right and wrong blurred on the level of individual characters. She views Dr. Sophia Rikkin motivations as hyper-complex.

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"What's interesting about her is that she's a scientist but … there's much more than just desire to solve a problem to find a cure for violence," Cotillard told Mashable. "So she's a very mysterious person and what I love about the relationship between Callum [Fassbender] and her is that basically she uses people to reach her goal."

Fassbender sees that in Sophia too, interpreting her as "a dictator in the making, you know, because she's such an idealist in this world and you find a lot of dictators they start off with this sort of idealism."

"Assassins and Templars share, in a way, the same pathology ... "

Kurzel himself was taken with the idea of a film that confused its audience's moral compass -- one of the reasons he signed up. That and Fassbender’s insistence that he do it.

"It's about two different ideologies," Kurzel told Mashable. "Templars believe in free will. They believe that everyone should have the opportunity to choose and to think for one's self and to not be seduced by divinity or by philosophy. They believe that you should find it yourself. At the same time they're part of a creed, part of a group that has a series of rules so there’s a slight contradiction in that."

He continued: "Templars believe that humanity is corrupt and that people need to be led and they need to follow. I thought that those two different ideals were really strong. Both had values and both had negatives to them as well. That wall was much more ambiguous and much more complex and I think that's unique for a style of film like this."

This ethical nuance was one of the most compelling things about the project to Cotillard too. "When you mix darkness with light and you don't know what is right or wrong -- these characters all have like high desire for humankind.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

"Assassins and Templars share, in a way, the same pathology, which is how to deal with power and how it affects you. This is the kind of sick relationship we can have with power sometimes and that affects your humanity."

A good video game has a clear distinction between goodies and baddies. A good film based on a video game, needn't and shouldn't be so straightforward.

And in an action movie landscape full of usually clear-cut heroes and villains, a little ambiguity can go a long way.

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Topics Film