BEFORE: Picking up on the video-game vibe this week - "Tron" was an arcade game, and "Sucker Punch" just felt like one. "Prince of Persia" has been around a while as a computer game in one form or another since the late 80's. And linking from "Sucker Punch", Jena Malone was in "Donnie Darko" with Jake Gyllenhaal.
THE PLOT: A young fugitive prince and princess must stop a villain who unknowingly threatens to destroy the world with a special dagger that enables the magic sand inside to reverse time.
AFTER: I was just reading in an issue of GAMES magazine about a man named Dave Morice, who once wrote a 10,000 page poem in a 4-month marathon session. (Hah! 4 months - what a piker! Try four years, buddy!) He wrote the equivalent of a 100-page poem each day for 100 days - now, I don't know how many words were on each page, or whether they were double-spaced, but I have an affinity now for projects of this nature. When I order a printed book of my annual musings about movies, each one is pretty impressive in size - and three of them together makes me feel almost like I've accomplished something. Just a few paragraphs each day, kids, and you too can write the Great American Novel!
As Dave writes about the marathon "poem" (which also includes news articles, e-mails, lists of palindromes, spoofs of other poems, and the odd wordplay puzzle or two): "I became the poem, and the poem became me... If I was bored, the poem was bored. If I was happy, the poem was happy. The marathon poem didn't limit itself to simple perfection, it welcomed imperfection, and in doing so, it reached a more complex level of perfection."
I have to echo some of Dave's feelings, as I gear up to approach the 1,100-film mark. Of course I love a good movie, but I also love ripping on a bad movie. But what constitutes "good", and what makes up "bad"? Aren't these terms extremely personal and also arbitrary? Can't I learn something from a film, even if it's pointless or not up my alley? Hopefully so... But I should probably watch out for when I have a bad day at work or something, and whether that affects my feelings about the movie I watch later that night.
Which brings me back to "Prince of Persia", a film made by Hollywood insiders that probably had very few actual Persians in it. Plenty of Brits, and a few Americans - and OK, I guess no one expects them to shoot in Iran (modern-day site of Persia), so they opted for Morocco. I bet most people couldn't tell the difference anyway.
The key element here from adapting the video-game is the "do-over" aspect of the dagger - in the game, if you miss a jump or get ambushed by a character, you can "rewind" the last few sections of action and get another chance at things. Which any good video-game gives you these days, anyway - back in my day, if Pac-Man got eaten by a ghost, that was it, no do-overs. Except for the two extra lives, though...
But I'm not sure this translates so well to film - though I am a big fan of time-travel in general, this is a chance for someone to correct all of his actions that are mistakes, but it's depicted like an out-of-body experience, during which the user can witness the action being reversed. Didn't Nicolas Cage have this same power in "Next"? Wait, that was predicting the future - same deal in the end, really. Also, shades of "Donnie Darko".
But overall, I found this film rather hard to follow. Maybe it was all the Arabic names, but I think also there might have been too many characters, and a few too many reversals over who's got the dagger, and who's fighting who. Then again, maybe I just had a rough day and dozed off a few times. When that happens, I try to finish each film, but I've got to give up at some point, if I'm going to get any real sleep before my workday begins. It's my own personal "do-over", in some cases I need to watch the end of a film at work after 5 pm.
Bottom line - not enough story to justify two hours of my time. Probably works better as a video-game, as most video-games tend to do.
Also starring Gemma Arterton (last seen in "Clash of the Titans"), Ben Kingsley (last seen in "Schindler's List"), Alfred Molina (last seen in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"), Toby Kebbell (ditto), Steve Toussaint, Richard Coyle, Ronald Pickup (last seen in "The Fourth Protocol").
RATING: 4 out of 10 ostriches
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