Although, we’re not entirely sure why Newell also went with a sandpapered Green Zone aesthetic. Early on, a helpful map instructs us that the Persian Empire stretched to cover most of what is now Iran and Iraq - a neighbour to Scheherazade’s more glamorous Araby. Yes, Newell and his screenwriters make a token thrust at topicality by throwing in the false search for weapons as the kick-off for an attack on an innocent city, and including this gigantic ‘device’ ticking away beneath Middle-Eastern soil. The gods, this year’s rather literal variation on the deus ex machina, opting for the ditch-it-and-start-again approach to their creation. If the Pirates sequels became ever more tangled thickets of plot, here things are winningly simple: a good prince, a feisty princess, an evil uncle (when are they ever trustworthy?), and the worrying news that a nuclear billow of accursed sand is about to lay waste to all human kind. Controversially, for the junior demographic, he’s axed the game’s mindless demons for a non-creature feature. The results, straining so hard not to succumb to the film-as-game curse, find a tepid middle ground between a Bruckheimer hurl-it-up-there approach, and Newell’s devoted restraint in the cause of character and story. For those yet unacquainted with the particulars of the gaming sphere, Mike Newell’s Jerry Bruckheimer’s Prince Of Persia is an adaptation of the fifth iteration of the Persia games, helpfully also referred to as The Sands Of Time. It’s highly influential, has spawned six increasingly fangled sequels, and was so bloody hard, many Apple II’s plunged to their own deaths from bedroom windows. The theme was loosely Arabian Nights-ish, wherein a renegade prince negotiates pits of spikes and flames - a game drunk on the influence of Raiders’ opening ten minutes.
The key, as he professes, is to lose no sleep to the petty grievances of the internet grumbler, and give your all to the demands of the cinemagoer.īack in 1989, Jordan Mechner created a platform-jumping classic on the Apple II, a grumbling grey packing case of a computer. It’s a barren landscape, but to a man unfazed by transforming a dusty theme-park ride into a billion-dollar franchise, why not rise to the challenges of making a gainful movie out of a popular platformer.īruckheimer, now a Yoda-like presence among the producers of Hollywood, is prone to shrugging his shoulders and waving away the imponderables of the business.
How teeth gnash at the mere mention of previous attempts at entertainment synergy - those pummelling mishaps, Super Mario Bros., the Tomb Raiders or Street Fighters. Yes, there’s no avoiding the obvious, Prince Of Persia arrives dragging that old bête noire for the blockbuster consumer: ‘based on a video-game’. Post-production could ease and, optimistically, the returns would be seen on screen and shatter the famous curse that any game-to-film adaptation will be as much fun as an argumentative root canal. Here is a big-scale movie, amusingly given its subject-matter, which stretched its own time-frame. There was certainly ample opportunity when the film was postponed from the growing hurly-burly that was the summer of 2009 and into 2010. Persia arrives at the party with the firmly held belief that the Jerry Bruckheimer formula is enough: no need for the hasty addition of an extra dimension. What gives? Is this some kind of Arabian-styled throwback to the naked passions of the Cassavetes canon? A tribute, with humble computer-generated sandstorms, to the vérité streets of Leigh or Loach? Surely, it’s just so 2008. So when a multi-million-dollar production of suitably fantasy orientation comes dressed only in plain old 2D, we stare hard-done-by at the poster and twitch irritably at the very idea of having to put up with mere narrative and acres of golden CGI. How swiftly we have acclimatised to this multi-dimensional post-Avatar age of big-bang entertainment.
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