One of the few computer games I’ve actually played all the way through is “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.” Feeling anticipation for a video game adaptation is unusual, but finally, an opportunity to actually compare both sides of the adaptation (Super Mario Bros. may be the last time it happened).
So of course, almost nothing substantive was maintained in taking it from game to Prince of Persia the movie. Perhaps a hero fighting a horde of monsters in the desert would make for too close a similarity to the Mummy movies (Egyptian, Persian, how many of us would know the difference?), so the story from the game is mostly dumped and only the broadest features are maintained, mostly around the elements of gameplay. One thing that confuses me about video game adaptations is that the producers think that something being fun to play in a game will also be fun to watch. Sometimes that’s true, but our bars are full of people watching baseball, not other people playing Mario Kart.
The main elements that carry over from game to movie are:
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Our hero is quite the acrobat. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the titular prince, Dastan, though he has no claim to the throne having been a street orphan until as a child he impressed the king and was adopted into the royal family. No wall is too tall or smooth for Dastan to scale quickly, no roof too fragile to leap onto from four stories up. Every room has convenient poles for climbing, twirling, and launching brutal kicks to the heads of nameless minions. In a video game when you’re steering, that is all very fun. When watching, with quick edits and tight shots not really allowing anything to be seen, it quickly wears thin.
Plus, when playing a game, the task isn’t so much to do acrobat things, but to solve the puzzle of figuring out what acrobatic things need to be done in what order to accomplish a goal. In the movie, a complete lack of familiarity with the environment mostly sucks the drama out of each clever advance.
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There’s a dagger that can reverse time with only the holder aware of it. In the game this is essentially a fantastic “save game” do-over mechanism. If you die, just reverse time a few seconds and try again, without having to replay the entire scene. In the movie, this would be such a powerful tool that it must be crippled—and so ends up being used only a couple of times. This is good because not much thought was given to its implications. In one use, I’m pretty sure Dastan somehow reversed time one minute to somehow end up at the exact moment he was when he reversed time and somehow in possession of knowledge he shouldn’t have had. Yes, that’s a confusing sentence, but it was a confusing scene.
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Um…Persia is still in the title.
That’s about it. Pretty much all of the story from the game is dumped in favor of a sword-and-sandals version of The Fugitive Meets The Mummy. Dastan and his brothers are leading the king’s army on some errand when they learn that a nearby holy city is hoarding weapons for use against them. They invade, and due to Dastan’s personal superpower of not getting hit by arrows through blind luck, take the city. Shortly afterward during a celebration, Dastan’s adoptive father, the king (Ronald Pickup), is killed, and Dastan is held responsible for a crime he did not commit (The Fugutive part).
Dastan escapes the city with the aid of Tamina (Gemma Arterton), the city’s high priestess, and soon learns that she was protector of the mystical Dagger of Time, which can reverse time up to one minute, with only the bearer of the dagger aware of it. Of course, it also turns out that in the wrong hands the dagger can destroy the world—which would, to everybody but the bad guys, be less than ideal. The bad guys, though, apparently aware that it will end the world, want the dagger so that they can go farther back in time and rewrite history. The apparent inability for both to happen doesn’t seem to be much of an issue.
With that set-up, and plenty of swordplay and humor, it’s off to prove Dastan’s innocence and maybe save the world (The Mummy part; if only they’d kept the undead characters from the game but maybe that would have been too much similarity). Dastan and Tamina travel the Persian empire (where nothing appears to have been more than a couple days’ horse ride from anything else) meeting interesting people and narrowly escaping dangerous situations.
If you’re one of the people who has sent me email in the past to say, “It’s just a dumb movie; turn off your brain and have fun,” then you probably won’t be bored by this. For me, however, all the chaos was boring. There are moments of interesting action (such as an ostrich race) and actual comic relief from Sheik Amar (Alfred Molina, chewing a lot of scenery), a tea-party revolutionary…er, small government libertarian hiding behind horrible stories designed to keep the king’s taxmen away.
The reference to the tea party movement is only a slight exaggeration. If you’re looking to find criticism of the Bush administration in this movie, the surface does not need to be scratched very deeply. After all, the entire set-up is the mistaken invasion of a Persian city based on the faulty intelligence that it possesses weapons they don’t actually have, and in fact they don’t even have the ability to create them if they so wanted. If nothing else, when the boredom becomes too much, trying to figure out which cabinet official would be represented by Ben Kingsley’s Uncle Nazim provided some respite.
This is generally the part of a review where I tell you that while it sounds like I hated the movie, it wasn’t actually so horrible. It’s true, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time isn’t horrible. For example it never quite reaches the depths of stupidity and blandness of the Nicholas Cage National Treasure movies. It is pretty bad, though, and while high art is not what one should expect from a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, we should hope for better than this. There is actually a pause in the middle of saving the world so that a slow kiss can happen. Priorities, people! Really, it is hard to know exactly where things went wrong. It may just be as simple as the fact that taking a great interactive experience that was the video game, and turning into a great passive experience in the form of a movie is simply a very difficult thing to do.
For the most part, things are filmed competently by director Mike Newell, who has some history with visually interesting film environment from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Love in the Time of Cholera. The script is pretty bad, acting like a puzzle-based video game in simply setting up one set piece after another without a whole lot of connective tissue, and needing way too much expository dialogue to maintain even a minimal semblance of clarity. The casting is somewhat odd, with Jake Gyllenhaal stuck with a British accent (as with all sand-and-blood movies, anybody from farther east than Gaul must have a British accent) and it isn’t Gemma Arterton’s fault she’s mostly around to look pretty (which she does quite successfully) and spout much of the tedious exposition.
Eventually, boredom was replaced by confusion during the requisite conclusion via massive action sequence after massive action sequence, all culminating in a digital display designed to overwhelm while never clarifying. At least the scenes should have been massive, yet somehow they look only slightly better than actual video game cut scenes and are so obviously computer generated that tension is lost. Yet again we are treated to an underground treasure cave of such immense size it appears to be bottomless; it’s also home to ancient complex single-use booby traps that can apparently be avoided by simply digging a hole. Then the movie ends with a pat resolution that offers no explanation at all.
For parents, be warned that the movie does earn its PG-13 rating with increasing violence through the movie. The early scenes involve death but no blood, but by the end things get somewhat more graphic with projectiles through body parts, blood, and slow speech-accommodating death. There are also a couple potentially scary scenes involving CGI snakes.
I can’t honestly say you won’t have fun at this movie—a lot of people will. But keep in mind that the Dagger of Time is only good for going back 60 seconds, and if you had as much fun as I did watching it, you’ll need about 116 daggers to go back and warn yourself.
- Wide release on Friday, May 28, 2010.
- Directed by Mike Newill.
- Written by Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro, and Carlo Bernard.
- Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Gemma Arterton, Ben Kingsley, Alfred Molina.
- Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action.
- Running time 116 minutes.
- Alex’s rating: 4 out of 10.
