Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Directed by: Mike Newell
Written by: Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard
Full credits at IMDb

Prince of Persia is the kind of movie you suffer through, eh? But before considering its reactionary sensibilities, I’d like to...point out that, before the movie shifts earnestly into its Ridley Scott-ness, it opens by cribbing the studio’s own Aladdin: Dastan, like that Disney hero, is a street urchin who becomes a prince and relies on magic—there, a genie; here, a sand-filled dagger. That early origins-sequence here, in which Dastan’s younger self defends an apple-stealing child, played out almost as a shot-for-shot remake of the cartoon’s "One Jump" sequence, just stripped of all its music and energy. Hey, that was a common motif of this movie: it reminded you of something else, just without all those things that made the original memorable. (Straight from my notes, regarding that middle section: “like a screwball comedy stripped of all wit or chemistry, just complaining.”) Like, it was an Iraq War allegory, up until it wasn’t: when the overemphasis on mysticism and franchise self-mythology shoved any clever present-day parallel off the rails.

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine
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Watch the trailer: