Tuesday
Jun012010
Prince of Persia The Sands of Time Movie Review
Tuesday, June 1, 2010 at 01:56PM
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is perhaps the best video game movie released to date. Unfortunately, the standards for video game movies are quite a bit lower than other movies.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Dastan, a street urchin adopted as a third son by the Persian king. Dastan has very little character development and the little he has follows generic action-movie lines. He is the “lovable rogue” who wisecracks and always manages to get out of rough situations alive. Gyllenhaal does a good job of playing Dastan, but the character has no depth. He starts out a cool action guy who's wild and reckless and is not morally driven enough to argue with his superiors and at the end he is a cool action guy who's wild and reckless.
His banter with the other lead character, Princess Tamina is, for the most part, funny. Princess Tamina is the love interest and also an incredibly flat character. They have a good banter to their petty bickering through the first half of the movie, but when they start becoming closer they stop bickering as much and become less interesting. Their relationship is amusing, but it is never even remotely believable.
In addition the villain is obvious from the beginning of the movie, and is essentially a walking cliché. Sheik Amar and his bodyguard Seso add more comic relief and a few good action scenes, but none of the characters are particularly strong. Still, between the Shiek and Dastan and Tamina’s banter, the movie has a good amount of humor that keeps things going through its clichéstorm of a plot.
The plot revolves around a magic Dagger of Time that allows the wielder to travel backwards in time a certain amount of time if certain mystical sand is inside of its hilt. Because of a significant change from the game, the Dagger of Time gets very little use, and its obvious combat advantages are ignored, which is rather disappointing. There is almost no sand of time throughout the movie, meaning the only part of the movie that wasn't a cliché was wasted.
The movie also relies too much on “bullet time” for whenever a main character does something particularly “cool.” This quickly becomes annoying, especially when combined with the hard-to-follow action scenes that move a little too fast. However, the scenes of acrobatics and parkour are fun to watch.
Despite all of these problems, Prince of Persia is a fun movie. Seeing Dastan do fancy acrobatics around rooftops and the silly banter make up for the lack of depth. It’s a fun, “turn your brain off” movie. If you’re a fan of the game who doesn’t mind massive changes from the source material, or just feel like a dumb action movie with some good humor, it’s worth giving a shot. . I only played 2 hours of Prince of Persia, so I didn't mind or notice many of the changes, but from what I've seen, a lot of serious fans of the game were upset by the movie.
Reader Comments (8)
"Prince of Persia, The Sands of Time" was probably one of the movies which turned my disappointment other way around. To be honest when I entered the cinema I was expecting crappy story and not a lot of action. Those expectations were destroyed when the movie started to with back story to prince and then a battle scene. The battle scene was made in really awesome way and I was left pleased. Through out the whole story it was just ups and downs, they didn't leave the watcher waiting for action or any other events for long, since the action scene just kept on coming on and on. The ending was pretty interesting and it wasn't another misleading and disappointing story. I just loved it.
Prince of Persia is definitely one of the best movies this year.'``
the ending pissed me off. its like 'wow its back to the beginnning and no one remembers anything that happened except him'
he should have become king after his annoying brothers died and got with the princess (who actually remembers falling for him)
other than that I actually enjoyed it, i just can't resist complaining.
Prince of Persia has definitely great graphics and storyline. Jake is also the best actor for this movie.-`*
i love Prince of Persia, the game version is a classic all time favorite~"'
the thing i like about Prince of Persia is the suspense and action that you get -`,
Prince of Persia is the best, wether it is the game or the movie we are talking about.-.
Prince of Persia is the best, i really like the lead actor and also the princess, the princess is very pretty "`"