Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

blog-pop-01 Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) – AMK Hub. There’s just a couple of video games that Ling has interest in, and also film adaptations if they ever get turned into them. One’s Uncharted, and the other is Prince of Persia.

The latter is a long franchise of video games that has been around for 20 years now. The stories told in each video game title tend to be only loosely based from one to the next. What does carry from title to title is the character itself: the games were all ‘action’ genre types, with the titular character capable of great acrobatic prowess, sword fighting skills as he defeated enemy opponents and solved puzzles.

I’ve been eagerly waiting for the movie adaption of the video game character, though to be truthful I was a little disconcerted when the actor playing the Prince was announced: Jake Gyllenhaal. The actor has been known for more dramatic rules and isn’t quite the physical type of beef cake the role demanded. But I’m eating my own words now. Even if Gyllenhaal doesn’t quite speak like an Arabian prince, he at least looks the part with his lanky yet well-buffed build. According to casting rumors, girly man Orlando Bloom was in the reckoning too – and worse still, teen throb Zac Efron too. Am I glad that neither actually got the role.

The story is just serviceable and acts as a vehicle to get from one scene to the next. Prince Dastan and his two older brothers, the successor to the throne Prince Tus, lead an invasion against the city of Almouth in a campaign to extend the Persian empire. Dastan encounters the Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton) who is guardian to a mythical dagger with a glass chamber that when filled with the right sand is capable to letting its wielder turn back time. Power usurpers to the throne want the dagger, and it falls onto Dastan and Tamina to stop them and return the dagger to its rightful place of protection.

Though the film hints that it’s set against the backdrop of a historic Persia from our real world, there is really nothing in the film that seems to be an accurate representation of the ancient empire. You get a variety of accents from a cast of actors from both sides of the Atlantic and none of them even sound remotely Middle-Eastern. It’s musical chairs all round. Gyllenhaal’s American but speaks with a British accent. Ben Kingsley – the great English actor who plays Dastan’s uncle does his native accent, as does Arteton. But English actor Alfred Molina – who plays an entrepreneurial manager of ostrich races – is pulling an American accent. You’d need a scoresheet just keep track of the accent swaps. And let’s not even get started on time reversal existing in the real world.

The story itself is a little convoluted at spots, especially when it gets to mumbo jumbo explaining how the dagger works and how it came about. Arterton though is on hand to explain all that, and her role as Tamina and the guardian of the dagger, is about identical to her last role: that of Io in Clash of the Titans. At least her dialog is less gyrating here, though the supposedly thrust and parry dialog she has with Dastan at too many spots still feel forced. Molina is fun, and watching him as the money-minded Sheik reminds me of the late Oliver Reed’s similar role of Proximo in Gladiator.

The entire film is drenched in dust, sand and earthen colors. There are several (obviously) CG-enhanced shots that are stunning, especially the camera pans showing off the huge vistas of Persian cities. Scenes move along quickly too, and while the The Sands of Time runs for a modest 116 minutes, the film actually feels a lot longer.

All’s not well though and there are two things that just didn’t work for me. Firstly, camera work is problematic in the action scenes.  So, while the Prince goes about pulling off many of the acrobatic stunts from the video games, it’s maddeningly difficult to see just beyond a fraction of it with the many tight camera crops and scene switching. It’s not quite to the vertigo-inducing degree of Michael Bay’s steroid-induced camera operators, but it’s really isn’t easy following the action scenes in this film.

[Spoiler alert]

More seriously though – and spoiler alert here – is the film’s ending. Admittedly it’s not easy doing films which are based around time travel. What films like Back to the Future did successfully was to have time return to its original point, but in a different and alternative time line. In The Sands of Time, and as a result of the dagger working its time travel magic, things return to a point where none of the dramatic events that occur in most of the film will now occur. As a plot device, it’s valid. However, it’s still a cop-out and you might feel terrifically cheated that all those scenes that tried to elicit emotional investment from you throughout is all reversed and now never happened.

Well, Ling liked the show a lot more than last week’s Robin Hood, as I did. Not perfect, but still a watchable…