Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Posted on August 7th, 2010
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
[Rating: 7/10]
Dastan is an orphan whose courageousness leads the king of the Persian Empire to adopt him into the royal family, raising him as a prince. Fifteen years later, Dastan and his brothers attack the holy city of Alamut, believed to be arms dealing with Persia’s enemies. This sets of a series of disastrous events, all seemingly linked to a mysterious dagger said to have magical powers.
This movie is one that has had quite a bit of hype to it from when it was announced. Not only because it was a film adaptation of a popular console game, but also that the cast was not ethnically authentic. The latter is an issue surrounding most movies that have ethnic groups, such as Memoirs of a Geisha, Dragonball and The Last Airbender. Admittedly in many to most cases, the cast chosen for the movie tends to fail rather spectacularly, but for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, I felt it was one of the better attempts. One area this movie really delivered in for me were the stunning backdrops and sets. The music score was also fairly decent and costumes were appropriate for the theme. The characters were actually likeable and had bits of personality in them that kept them from being cookie cutter hollywood fantasy characters. I was also plesantly surprised the script did not suffer from annoyingly cheesy lines as with the Dragonball movie. Gemma Arterton put up a good and spunky performance as Princess Tamina, and there are all these little elements that made the show more interesting and quirky, like the epic ostrich race – Alfred Molina’s character, Amar brought some nice comedy into the story and Amar’s bodyguard/friend, Seso was rather intriguing, being an assassin/knife thrower with a conscience. While I have not actually played the original games, I rather enjoyed this film and thought it was a good piece of family fun, certainly not as terrific as Pirates of the Caribbean but probably one of the better fantasy films I’ve seen since that trilogy.
Filed under: ** movie, fantasy