How nifty would it be to have a dagger that turns back time, if only for a minute? You could use it to reverse major consequences from just a single, brief mistake. In real life, it could be handy, but in fiction, it has the opposite effect. What good is a plot device if, by design, it avoids any suspense that might have come from a difficult situation?
At one point in the film, our heroes are surrounded by a hoard of snakes. With one simple press of a button, time is reversed, giving Prince Dastan a mere second to get the upper hand and kill all of the snakes. It might sound like a cool concept, but when you actually see the sequence, it’s like the device didn’t do anything at all, but make the sequence shorter. Such a device is a double edged sword. There is nothing compelling in a story where the hero can just press a button and reverse a crucial moment. But if he doesn’t use the dagger, it leaves the audience baffled. There is, indeed, one catch to using the device. You must have a certain kind of sand injected into the heart of the device or else it won’t work. When the beautiful Tamina tells us this, you would think that create a problem for our hero. No, it turns out she has a few drops of it and he can use it anytime he feels like it.
One could argue that without the problematic dagger, you wouldn’t have a movie. After seeing Prince of Persia, I’m not quite sure that would be a bad thing. After a couple decades worth of video game adaptions, I’m afraid to say Hollywood is still taking the wrong approach. One of the incredible benefits of an adaption is to take a story that appeals to one demographic and find a way for it to appeal to another, without destroying the spirit of it. Prince of Persia is yet another video game movie made for video game fans. If you played the game, you might like the movie, but it leaves the rest of us cold.
Scenes are poorly staged, with overproduced effects, cheesy slow motion shots, and plenty of sloppy, fast-cutting handheld shots that limit what we can see in action set pieces. Dastan also appears to be Superman, as he can leap tall bounds with little effort. He does stumble a bit like Indiana Jones, and appears to have a tad bit of Jack Sparrow’s swagger, but there in lies another problem. Our far too powerful hero just feels like a mishmash of much better characters from much better films.
Video game movies don’t have to be like this. They can still have the same adventurous spirit in their theatrical counterparts as they do in the original games. While both formats are visual heavy, film and video games are two very different mediums of entertainment. When transferring something from one to the other, different approaches have to be taken. There needs to be an emotional connection. You have to care about the characters and you have to believe they are flawed enough to actually die in the perilous situations they have to face. Dastan is a human character. As far as I know, he’s not from another world and he doesn’t have superpowers, so he should only be able to stretch his own human capabilities. If he has to jump far, it should be a more believable distance.
Video games can be fun, but only with participation. If you’ve ever sat around and watched your friend play a video game for a couple hours, you’d know that it gets old quick. That is what it is like watching Prince of Persia.
Tags: Prince of Persia review
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