Screen Machine

Review: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Clearly it is the year for beefed-up animated films. First there was Avatar – i.e Fern Gully on steroids – and now Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – clearly Aladdin on steroids. Prince of Persia is not just a little like Aladdin—its plot sees a street urchin/street rat stands up to a prince in defence of small children, and turns out to be the only man with the power to enter an underground cave filled with treasure. In the end he is inspired by his heart of gold to save everyone from an evil ruler weighed down by too much black eyeliner, and he comes through to win the love of a princess.

It is not only the basic storyline that is similar. During the opening number of Aladdin the protagonist, on the run from the authorities, falls into a room of young women in their delicates who, song-and-dance style, greet him with pleasure. In a Disney film, for kids, such a cultural oversight can be forgiven. But in Prince of Persia, Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer should have known better than to include such a moment. (Just as those producers over at Village Roadshow should have known better than to ever send their Sex and the City ladies to the Middle East—clearly, Hollywood still has a lot to learn about sacrificing cultural sensitivity for “entertainment”. Or perhaps not, given its huge intake at the box office.)

Some are calling Prince of Persia problematic, even insulting (something which I will not try to dispute), because none of the leads in the film are, in fact, Persian (or even Middle Eastern). My response to this is twofold though. Firstly, we are talking about Hollywood and something like this is not surprising in the least. Secondly, the original game was not Persian either. Invented by one Jordan Mechner from New York City, the franchise is entirely American.

But what makes this film unremarkable is its unoriginality and blandness (heaven forbid what might happen in any of the franchise’s six other films, as has been purported). With a typically uninspired “magical” golden glow soaking the entire film’s landscape, heavily spread throughout almost every frame, Prince of Persia regrettably becomes not so much gold, as beige. Neither do the unrefined narrative overlays, set in an “ethnic” yellow text, do much for the film—once again, film producers have misplaced the charms of a pixellated video game and tried to convince themselves that everything can be successfully translated the cinema. And once again, they are wrong.

Ultimately, there isn’t that much to do with Persia in this film (especially given that filming was based in Morocco and a British film studio). Director Mike Newell seems mostly invested in the fetishisation of Gyllenhaal’s body, half-naked or seductively wrapped in leather for the most part. But aside from Jake Gyllenhaal’s chiselled abs and cheeky grin, there’s not much to recommend. All of that choose-your-own-adventure type mystery and self-expressive sense of achievement that comes from playing the computer game is gone. There is too much of that faux-insightful “destiny” cliché going on. My favourite quote is the repeated gem, “We make our own destiny, princess.”This makes the film sit somewhere between serious action-drama and pulpy rubbish, and because Disney doesn’t seem to know quite which kind of film it want to be, there is little hope that we will figure it out. If only it were done differently (say, in a similar manner to the cocky indulgence of Iron Man 2) I could call it just a bit of lighthearted, frivolous fun.

In the end, Prince of Persia is most notable for not being as good as Aladdin. The film’s heroine, Tamina (Gemma Arterton), has nothing on Jasmine and her sidekick Rajah. Plus, Aladdin has a cool monkey pal who wears a fez.

Eloise is a graduate of cinema studies from the University of Melbourne. She is interested in world cinema and in Hollywood cinema of the classical period, particularly film noir. Eloise is a member of the Melbourne Cinematheque Committee.

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