Things I Learned from Movie X

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

By Edwin Davies

June 2, 2011

Sorry, chicks have to walk.

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Jerry Bruckheimer knows all too well of the sheer power of the man, and chose to unleash him on not one, but two slightly crappy blockbusters last year, casting him as a tax-averse, ostrich-loving trader in Prince of Persia and an evil wizard in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. (Yes, someone made a wizard movie with Nicolas Cage in which he is playing anything other than the crazy, evil wizard.) He's a very odd character, full of strange intonations and interests, and if we're to assume that the film was meant to be the launching pad for a Pirates-style franchise, he seems intended as the Jack Sparrow of the story. As such, he's the most vibrant and exciting character in the whole film, and every second he's on screen is more entertaining than the rest of the film could ever hope to be. Mainly because those scenes consist of Alfred Molina talking about suicidal ostriches, or pointing out that you can't organize an ostrich race with just one ostrich, and I could watch that all day all day. If you've ever seen a more pure look of joy than the one that crosses his face when he shouts "Behold, the mighty ostrich!" at the start of an ostrich race - which is the best kind of race, obviously - then, I dunno, you've probably seen the face of a newborn when it sees its mother for the first time or some beautiful shit like that.

When are we going to get to the time travel factory?

The Macguffin of The Sands of Time is a magic dagger that allows anyone holding it to turn back time for short periods, allowing them to survive a snake attack, or bring someone back to life after they have injested poison, for example. The dagger was one of the main innovations in The Sands of Time game, and its timeline-altering capabilities were played up heavily in all the advertising for the film, yet the sequences of people actually using the dagger for the sole reason that it exists are perversely few and far between. Making a film about a dagger that turns back time, then not actually allowing people to use it to mess about with time travel, is like making a Jane Austen adaptation without unrequited love or bonnets; it just isn't done.




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Eventually, and predictably, when the film finally does allow Dastan to turn back time in a big way at the end of the film, it allows him to jump right back to the very start so he can have the mega-happy ending, but it can't help but feel shallow since it brings everyone back to life and renders all the events of the film moot. It also sets up one of those weird and creepy romances where the two halves have completely divergent memories and experiences, so they might as well be different people to the ones who fell in love over the course of the story, that only exist in time travel movies.

The mega-happy ending also seems unfair on the rest of the characters; technically, only Dastan got to go on that adventure, whilst everyone else has no idea that they came this close to being obliterated by...whatever the hell it was that Ben Kingsley was doing with the dagger and that glowing wall. To redress the balance, I suggest that anyone watching Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time watch up until the Persian army take over the holy city at the start, then just skip to the last chapter. That way, you get the same experience that everyone in the film did; you get a great victory, followed by two princes going crazy and murdering their kindly uncle in front of thousands of disbelieving soldiers.


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