Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is 'a terrific movie.'

I let all the negative reviews dissuade me from seeing this when it came out
last summer. Pity. I quite liked it. Orson Scott Card nailed the things
about it that I liked.

http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2010-05-30.shtml

Back in 1993, when they made a movie based on the game *Super Mario Brothers
*, I actually had high expectations. Obviously, the videogame had no actual
plot or characters, so I expected the screenwriter to have a clever and
inventive story with witty dialogue for actors like Bob Hoskins and John
Leguizamo.

Since it turned out to be pure garbage, mind-numbingly bad, it's no surprise
that two of the three writers never got another film credit. Of course, the
third screenwriter was Ed Solomon, co-writer of *Men in Black* and *Bill &
Ted's Excellent Adventure*, but even he was not able to get over the deadly
curse of basing a movie on a videogame.

The biggest problem is that while a certain kind of computer game will often
have a story, what it doesn't have -- and usually *can't* have -- is a fully
fleshed-out character as the hero. That's because the player is the hero,
and the game must be built around the player's goal: to win, or at least not
to get killed.

Over the years, we have all learned to approach movies-based-on-videogames
with a certain degree of skepticism, to wit: This is going to suck. Let's go
in order to see how badly it sucks, and if the special effects are good.

So we come to *Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.*** It has four credited
writers, which usually is a sign that the script kept getting worse and
worse until it died, and then they filmed it.

And if you play computer games, you watch the flow of the story and it feels
like a game: You can see when you're moving to a different game level, and
you know when you get to the boss bad guy (i.e., the final obstacle on the
level; the bad guy who is hardest to kill).

But a funny thing happened on the way to making another awful videogame
adaptation. Somebody screwed up and made the movie good.

That's right. You heard me correctly. I think *Prince of Persia* is actually
a terrific movie, which I enjoyed as if it were an Indiana Jones adventure
fantasy.

The storyline is centered around a knife made of a special stone, and if you
fill its hilt with a certain magical sand, then by pressing a button on the
end of the hilt, it propels you back in time just far enough that you can
stop the icky or awful thing that just happened. It only takes you a few
moments back, and it quickly runs out of sand. This has videogame written
all over it.

What makes it all work is that somewhere among the four screenwriters,
there's a really smart person. The story deals with royal politics -- the
hero, Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal), is a street orphan whose courage and loyalty
impressed the king of Persia, who adopted him into the family, making him
the prince from the title.

Amid the usual high-sounding speeches, there is really a complicated set of
relationships among the king, the king's younger brother (Nizam, played by
Ben Kingsley) who once saved his life, and the king's three sons, of whom
Dastan is the youngest and the least likely to inherit anything.

Now, in Romantic storytelling there is no characterization per se. The
characters are what they do; their relationships are about the exigencies of
the moment. This is true of *Prince of Persia*, but what the characters do
actually makes sense, and their motives are so understandable that we the
audience end up liking most of them and caring what happens.

So when the actors showed up for filming, they were given a script that
wasn't junk. And here's the miracle: The actors then proceeded to make the
film even better than the pretty good script deserved. Ben Kingsley, of
course, adds class to everything he does. Gemma Arterton is luminous, smart,
and sometimes scary as the princess who is supposed to have been the
guardian of the magic knife.

Ronald Pickup as the king is never, never, never embarrassing -- unlike Liam
Neeson, for instance, in *Clash of the Titans*. And that's a good
comparison. *Titans* and *Persia* are about equal in their action and
special effects, give or take an effect. But *Titans*, based (loosely) on
Greek mythology, has many embarrassing moments and a good number of
plotlines that amount to nothing. While *Prince of Persia* never embarrassed
me and never wasted our time with plotlines that went nowhere.

The princes, the leader of the Hassansins, the bigger-than-life Sudanese
knife thrower, the comic-relief ostrich racing entrepreneur -- they are all
very good in their parts.

But the crowning achievement of this film is taking indie-style actor *Jake
Gyllenhaal*, who was luminous in the title role of *Donnie Darko* but has
since seemed misplaced in many a movie, and casting him as an action hero in
a smart movie.

I think Gyllenhaal is brilliant. It's not just that he beefed up his body
for the part -- that's practically a given. Nor is it that he never loses
his wry self-deprecation -- again, that's like the minimum requirement.
Gyllenhaal makes the character seem genuinely smart (now the list is
shorter; add Kiefer Sutherland) and his eyes are a thousand fathoms deep;
but it's more than that.

He is, in fact, better at the Harrison Ford part than Harrison Ford. I mean,
come on -- did anyone believe for a split second that Indiana Jones was
really a professor of *anything?* Gyllenhaal has the ability to do the wit
and the heroics of Harrison Ford, but he can also show depth, real pain,
sincere devotion in a way that draws us in behind the surface.

If all the other elements of this film had been in place, but we'd had, say,
Tobey Maguire in the part (and Maguire was very good in *Spider-Man),* this
would not have been a great movie, merely an adequate one. Remember the
moment when Maguire was trying to show grief over the death of his
grandfather in the first *Spider-Man*? It was well-directed, so its
awfulness didn't really penetrate -- but Maguire simply did not have the
chops.

Gyllenhaal has them; he can do it all. He has flair and style, but he also
has the ability to draw us into his soul (or at least fool us into thinking
he has) and make his character come to complete life. We aren't just
entertained or excited by his performance, we actual admire the humanity of
the character he's portraying. He makes us believe that a character this
good is real.

So even though I know there are people who didn't like the movie at all, I
can't help but wonder if they weren't so caught up in the low expectations
we bring to videogame movies that they missed the fact that this film was
something special, and that most of the life of the movie came from Jake
Gyllenhaal's amazing performance.

You have no idea how much I wish I could get Gyllenhaal to play the hero in
the film version of my novel *Homebody*, or the film version of my
Homecoming series, or the character Will in my novel *Wyrms*. Or Alvin in
the film version of my Alvin Maker series. Not that you've read any of those
books. My point is that he makes me want to have him play my deepest,
strongest, most interesting characters. He's an actor that a writer longs to
write for, because whatever you need, he can do it.

There is one more element to the success of this film: the use of parkour
moves at the heart of most of the action sequences, especially those
involving Dastan and the crew of soldiers he has trained. Parkour is the
art/sport of making use of the environment -- from trees and rocks to walls
and fences -- to be, not obstacles, but aids in the athlete's race from one
point to another.

The result, on film, is a kind of inspired insanity of movement. Where in an
Errol Flynn movie, for instance, climbing up in the tree to let the enemy
ride by underneath would be half a minute of film time, in *Prince of Persia
* similar cleverness hurtles by at such a pace that we have six or ten such
bits in the same half-minute. In short, it comes across as brilliant
improvised dance with people trying to kill you -- that somehow remains
believable.

Action movies like this don't win many awards (though I think this one
should be taken seriously for makeup, costume, art direction, and effects
awards); nor do brilliant action-movie performances like Gyllenhaal's get
Oscar nods.

Instead, movies like this compete for box office numbers. The "award" is
that people go see it.

On its opening weekend, *Prince of Persia* barely eked out a second-place
finish ahead of *Sex and the City*; family-movie *Shrek Forever After* still
won handily. But now it's time for the *Sex and the City* audience to come
see *Prince of Persia*, because even if you think you don't like action
movies, you will adore Gyllenhaal himself -- and his relationship with the
princess.

Likewise, the family audience for *Shrek* should also come back now and see
*Prince of Persia,* because except for the very youngest children, there
will be things to please everybody.

And those of you who think you hate videogame movies, please give this one a
real chance to convince you otherwise. The elements that come from videogame
structure are there, yes, but they aren't intrinsically bad. *Prince of
Persia* shows how you can make them all work by bringing interesting,
complicated characters into the story and then casting great actors in the
parts.

And if you think that's a recipe that would make *any* movie good, don't
make me start listing the movies with brilliant casts that sucked like a
sponge. The writers deserve credit here, and the producers, and the
director, and ... the whole package worked.

Do you get the idea that I really liked this movie? That's why I want you to
come see it so that your votes -- your tickets -- get counted in the
competition for the action-movie awards. If this film makes enough money
(and it's doing so well abroad that it is certainly convincing in foreign
markets), then we'll get sequels, and Jake Gyllenhaal will become a bankable
star, and our lives as filmgoers will improve.


Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |

*“I am not responsible for actions of the imaginary version of me you have
inside your head.”
Attributed to Teresa Nielsen Hayden*

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