After a real fallow period for gaming films in the last five years (unless you count the success of The Angry Birds Movie, a children’s cartoon based on a cellphone app), two movies in the last two months glanced up against greatness, at least within the limited bounds of video-game cinema. The first, and more frustrating, was Assassin’s Creed, Justin Kurzel’s adaptation of the wildly successful franchise that transposes stealthy action with various historical settings. In the Assassin’s Creed games, the player’s character uses a device called the Animus which allows him to project his mind back in time, to play as one of his ancestors, an assassin operating in the past (say, during the French Revolution, or the Crusades). It’s the kind of bonkers made-up technology that games use all the time as a simple story crutch.

Except Kurzel not only kept the Animus for the film, he made it the central focus of the story, which followed petty criminal Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender), a descendant of a famous assassin, being strapped into the device to experience the exploits of his murderous forefather. In the film, Callum plugs in, Matrix­-style, to a giant spinal tap attached to a crane, and leaps and jumps around in an empty warehouse, mimicking the memories of a murderous hero in 15th-century Spain, while lab assistants (led by Marion Cotillard) around him take notes. It was a broad metaphor for the act of gaming itself—Callum lives an action-packed, but consequence-free, life of bloody mayhem within his own mind. And eventually, as with the other lab rats around him, it begins to take a strange mental toll.

The problem with Assassin’s Creed, strangely enough, was that the action itself was muddy-looking and dull; every time the film cut to Callum’s historical visions, it was hard to stay invested. Kurzel is an Australian director who had previously worked on the dark true-story drama Snowtown and a grim, but well-received adaptation of Macbeth also starring Fassbender and Cotillard. He was better suited to the blurry morality of Assassin’s Creed than to the convoluted video-game logic of its plot or the sweeping vistas of its set-pieces. It was an unusual inversion of the typical problem with video-game films, which emphasize crisp action over deeper philosophizing.

Kurzel was also one of the only directors with any hint of prestige filmmaking in his resume that dared take on video games. Usually, such films are handed to relative neophytes or filmmakers with a background in music videos or commercials. There’s a reason more established directors stay away—Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) saw his reputation permanently dinged by the box-office failure of Prince of Persia, a Disney adaptation of a famed platform game, while Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code) took on the mighty task of adapting Warcraft to the screen and was greeted by punishing reviews for his years of work.