This is one of the biggest departures the movie appears to be taking from the source.
There’s clearly a desire to make the future more interesting than just between-mission downtime, which is promising for fans of the series lore: in later games a much bigger conspiracy was revealed, going all the way back to Adam & Eve and involving cross-millennia messages.
Whether we’ll get to see even a hint of that in the first movie is unclear, but there’s at the least the seeds of an inmate rebellion – the latest trailer, which was pretty much a supercut, hinted things would be violent in the future as well as the Spanish Inquisition.
In the original game, which the movie seems to be predominantly taking from, and there’s a hint at the psychological effect of going into the Animus, with Williams’ Moussa saying his real name is Baptiste, the voodoo poisoner whose memories he can access, who happens to be a character in the video games.
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Assassin’s Creed | "Cafeteria" Clip [HD] | 20th Century FOX