I love a movie with a good title screen.
The Prince of Persia movie is one of the few video game movies that is considered good. It is in my own list of favorite movies, though not because it is a video game movie. This movie does a lot of things well and is overall an enjoyable experience, even if you’ve never played the game.
Here are a few of the things I think this movie does very well from a storytelling perspective:
Characterizing the three brothers
Dustan: “Garsiv, your hand is on your sword again.”
Garsiv: “Where it should be!”
Tus: “Oh, my brothers!”
From this first scene where the three of them interact while talking about whether to attack Alamut, they perfectly portray their personalities as well as their opinions of each other.
When Dustan is later framed for killing his father, the brothers act to type in that Tus is conflicted about what to do and Garsiv just wants to cut Dustan open.
It makes it all the sweeter when Dastan is able to convince both of them that he is telling the truth which leads to the feel-good moment when they come together at the end. I love that the trust between the three brothers is such an important part of the story.
Dustan and Tamina
The relationship between Dustan and Tamina is basically a perfect example of the kind of relationship development I love, down to them calling each other ‘prince’ and ‘princess’ sarcastically at first, which later turn into terms of endearment.
They have no reason to trust each other, each using the other to get what they want, but over time they begin to trust each other, and that leads to respect, and then love. It’s such a natural progression that you have no doubt that they will come to love each other again even after time is rewound.
Tamina: “Please don’t mock me, Prince.”
Dustan: “Oh, I hardly think we know each other well enough for that, Princess.
But I look forward to the day that we do.”
Parkour
The choreography for this movie is top notch and that includes all the parkour elements. Since it’s one of the selling points of the game, of course it’s important in the movie too. Unfortunately it is not easily displayed by screenshots.
I’ll just leave this here.
What I Didn’t Like
This movie is not perfect, and it has a few things in it that I don’t like, and it took a while before I stopped and looked at those pieces closely enough to determine why I don’t like them.
This scene always bothered me, because basically, the Sheikh and all his guys followed our heroes from the desert into the mountains before asking what the heck happened with the snakes the night before, and are about to leave before Tamina bribes them with gold. It’s a rather obvious example of leaving a discussion until a later scene in order to improve pacing, and it’s always bothered me since I’m not sure it would’ve been any worse for them to have that discussion when they were still in the desert.
Dustan makes a lot of leaps of logic. While this basically keeps the plot from being too slow, the boy really does piece together plot elements very accurately from very little information. He is characterized as thinking well on his feet, so maybe that’s where you’re supposed to get it from. Luckily he does draw a few of the wrong hasty conclusions as well.
The Sands of Time just …go away when Dustan and Nazam go back in time. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to assume that Tamina was just wrong about the Sands of Time wiping out the earth, or what, but it’s played up as a huge problem, and then it isn’t one.
Despite the flaws, I have watched this movie over and over again. Generally the only scene I skip is the race to the sandglass, which is pretty good for a movie I’ve seen so many times.
