The “Prince of Persia: Sands of Time” movie needed people like me to enjoy it. I’ve been a fan of the 2003 video game of the same name since I first picked it up in 2007, and I devoured it and its second sequel, The Two Thrones, as fast as I could play them (the less said about Warrior Within, the better). If the movie had been good, people like me could’ve spread the word about the movie and the video games and started up Prince of Persia fever. But despite the high praise the video game received on its release — a 92% ranking on Metacritic! — its cultural cachet has come and gone. Even by the short attention span standards of today’s gamer, the 2008 reboot is too far in the past to be memorable.
Perhaps we might’ve been better served by an Assassin’s Creed movie, but timeliness is the least of PoP:SoT’s problems. Imagine “Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl” without Johnny Depp, and you have a good idea of this movie’s personality: Its plot is bigger than it can handle, and it takes itself way too seriously. The movie centers around the Prince (Jake Gyllenhaal), who acquires the Dagger of Time, a powerful artifact that can reverse time. He meets a princess (Gemma Arterton) whose sacred duty is to guard the Dagger, and finds himself on the run from a treacherous vizier who wants the Dagger’s power for himself.
This is where the movie’s similarities to the video game end. In the game, the Prince is tricked into unleashing the Sands of Time, which turn an entire kingdom (including the Prince’s father) into sand zombies, and with the aid of Farah, a princess his father enslaved, pursues the Vizier, who holds the Sands of Time hourglass and wants the Dagger for himself. The rest of the plot centers around the Prince and Farah’s burgeoning relationship (which figures heavily into the story), and they pursue the Sands of Time hourglass through a castle.
Shown: The Prince and Farah using teamwork, not actively trying to murder each other.
In the film, conversely, the Prince is framed for the murder of his father and goes on the run, finding out his uncle (his father’s vizier) plans to use the Dagger to go back in time and make himself king; along for the ride are the princess (a captive from a recently conquered kingdom), a merchant who is always rambling about evading taxation, and the merchant’s bodyguard, a mostly-mute knife thrower. No sand zombies (for better or for worse).
The movie rambles its way into plot development after plot development, and it’s constantly throwing new ideas at the screen and seeing if any of them stick. The vizier hires creepy assassins to pursue the Prince; the Prince sells the princess into slavery; the princess leads the group to a mountain retreat to destroy the Dagger (and herself in the process), but fails; the Prince risks all to warn his brother (now the king) and succeeds in doing so, only for him to die minutes later; and so on and so forth. All in all, the film is a confusing muddle — it doesn’t trust its own plot to carry the story, so it keeps trying to come up with new things to keep us busy.
While I hate to say it, the movie is not an enjoyable experience, and while I saw it hoping to find something redeeming about it, I left feeling disappointed. In the right hands, it could’ve been another “Pirates of the Caribbean,” but the film lacks personality. Jake Gyllenhaal does a good job as the Prince (he’s the one actor I’ll single out as doing a good job in this movie), but this film lacks the winking humor of “Pirates”; it’s all grim save-the-world fare and nothing to smile about. There’s a good movie somewhere in PoP:SoT, but unfortunately, it’s not this one.
As a fan of the Prince of Persia series, I’ve got a few ideas for how the film could’ve been better and more accessible:
1) Change Gemma Arterton’s character, a lot
I had a bit of a celebrity crush on Gemma Arterton after seeing her in “Quantum of Solace,” but I had it beaten out of me by her shrill, joyless harpy of a character in PoP:SoT. The film was aiming for flirty banter, but this was severely undermined by the fact that the Prince and the princess actively seek harm on one another. Gemma Arterton’s character actively tries to kill the Prince on more than one occasion, but they still fall in love and kiss at the end. This is not good storytelling. I didn’t buy that ending kiss for a second, and at no point did I root for the two leads to get together. Make the character’s personality more like the princess in the video game: They didn’t get along at time, but their affection grew over time as they came to depend on one another.
2) More clever combat
While I found the movie overall to be a disappointment, I quite enjoyed the first 15 minutes, which featured the Prince doing the same kind of acrobatic parkour derring-do that was his trademark style in the video games. He uses a lot of clever tricks to sneak past or outwit his enemies, and he uses the terrain to his advantage a few times. This then largely disappears for the remainder of the movie in favor of generic swordfighting. Why did the film drop this element? It was fun to watch and made me think the Prince was actually a pretty smart guy.
3) Less exposition
This film tacked on too many plot elements to try to tell a big, sweeping story — the script could not see the forest for the trees. Simplicity is the key, though, to keeping your audience’s attention. If the story had been simply, “We have to take the dagger to Place X,” and stuck with that for the entire movie, I think it would have been much easier to follow, and would’ve cleared up more time for character-building moments instead of racing off to the next locale.
4) Actually use the Dagger of Time
So you have a weapon that can reverse time for the wielder, which has been described as being super-powerful and practically an instrument of the gods. Then you go through the movie barely using the darn thing. The Dagger of Time is used less than 5 times in the movie, and only once for its intended purpose (a battle goes horribly awry, so the Prince rewinds time and changes the outcome with his foreknowledge). What is it used for otherwise? Finding out how the Dagger works, or showing someone how the Dagger works. Groan.
5) Fix the ending
It’s established multiple times in the movie that the evil vizier plans to put the Dagger of Time into the Sands of Time, allowing him to rewind time as far back as he wants so he can become king. It’s also been established by the princess, who knows the sacred lore of the dagger, that unleashing the Sands of Time will cause the wrath of the gods and destroy the world (cue montage of giant sand clouds sweeping over and destroying cities). Except… it doesn’t. The vizier and the Prince fight over the Dagger at the end, thrusting the Dagger into the Sands and doing exactly what the princess said not to do — cue, again, the same montage of sand clouds destroying civilization. Except that’s not what happens — the Prince rewinds time to about 15 minutes into the movie and the world isn’t destroyed. Huh?
My high hopes for a Prince of Persia movie franchise have been dashed before they began. If you want the ultimate Middle Eastern-flavored parkour experience, play the 2003 video game instead.
Benton Sartore has been reading comic books off and on since his age was in single digits, and playing RPGs since college. His bookshelf is now full of 1960s Marvel Comics, Batman trades, and Star Wars comics, and he's been known to DM Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, and Serenity. He's most proud of his DVD collection — Joss Whedon is his master now.
Benton is also an acting editor at In Genre. 
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