Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

[The Doctor]

Enjoyable tosh. Lots of leaping from platforms. Special mention for the league of fighting men who chanted "HUH HUH HUH" whenever the camera cut to them.

-Ralph

[kayevcee]

Shakespeare it wasn't, but it was a coherent story well told and thoroughly entertaining throughout.

-Nick

[legios]

Not big, not clever but very entertaining. An enjoyable romp through ancient Persia-land. The requisite ancient parkour nonsense was great, and it had a suitably silly-but-epic (or possibly epic-but-silly) plot.

Daft fun, which was exactly what I was in the mood for.

Karl

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Well, on those verdicts I guess I'll be going to see it. I have a game on my PC called Prince of Persia which is small enough to fit on / run from a floppy disk. But I gather there have been other games since then.

From the film trailer, it looked like the human actor was replaced by an unconvincing CG figure every time he jumped off something. I won't go into it expecting to be blown away by its realism.

Martin

[Hero]

Saw it last night. Quite enjoyed it, considering it was a 'video game' movie

That time dagger was well cool. I want one now .

===KEN

[Deleted]

I have to admit I'm not a fan of computer game movies so I don't think I'll bother catching this one.

[Grand Moff Muffin]

This film came across to me as two stories and two films interspliced with one another, one of them quite good and engaging, the other one incredibly bad and annoying. And there were points in the film where I thought the bad one had killed off the good one completely.

Basically, I liked the interplay between the three brothers, who I think played off well against each other, and kept wrong-footing me when it came to my expectations about who was the villain. It avoided cliches and fairy-tale step-brother stereotypes, and at the same time harked back to some of the better traditional fables, in particular the three rival brothers from the Arabian Nights.

The crap of the film was every scene that involved the generic modern movie heroine who shattered any Persian feel the film may otherwise have had, and those comedy-relief sidekick types picked up in the desert, among them the token doomed black dude. It felt like there were two writers on the film, one of them trying to tell quite a moving story of family bonds and treachery, and the other trying to sideline it and do generic Hollywood stuff, where brothers are expendable characters and the audience is expected to care only about the shallow love interest. The princess was bad acting incarnate, and there was zero chemistry between her and the hero (in contrast to that between the three brothers).

SPOILER: Click to show

When both brothers were bumped off after seeing the light, and all the focus went onto other stuff, I had zero remaining interest in what happened in the rest of the film, and was very annoyed at the prospect of a generic Hollywood 'happy' ending where the hero got the girl and killed the bad guy and that was it. Thankfully, they didn't play it that way in the end.

When I like a film, I would normally relish the prospect of an extended version of it. With this film, I would like to cut out about half of it, leaving a well done one-hour fairy tale with no annoying heroine and comedy sidekicks. And maybe more scenes with the other two brothers.

As it stands, it follows the usual rule of computer game movies starting out with so much potential but fluffing the execution. Shame.

Martin

[The Doctor]

I understand your annoyance, but to have focussed on the brothers wouldn't have been to adapt the game, which was really the point of this film.

Though I enjoyed POP, I would like to see a more, well, serious take on this kind of thing also.

-Ralph