Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Not Wasted: Movie Review

Sup Internet? How you doin? Me? Oh I’m alright I guess…it snowed where I am, so while the weather changes here are expected, it’s still a little depressing. Anyway…you’re here because last night I went to see Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and you want to know what I thought. How flattering.

So, I am a fan of the video game series.. Sands of Time is actually probably one of my favourite all time games and definitely my favourite in the series. So I was excited to see the movie. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves…I saw the Tron Legacy trailer again at the theater, I swear to God I had a nerdgasm right there in front of everyone, and I don’t even care.

if you aren’t excited by this, there is no help for you….

Ladies, this is for you. You can hate Reese Witherspoon now.

Anyway. Ok the movie. How happy was I to see Jake Gyllenhaal play the Prince? I’m torn, he’s not a great actor, but I like him. So it was like, “Well I hope he doesn’t suck.” He did not. His performance was good. It was kind of cool to see Ben Kingsley have a role in this, of course when you are Ben Kingsley you can pretty much do what you want. Alfred Molina has a good role as a slave trader and Gemma Arterton does a fine job of being the Princess and the love interest for the Prince. The dialogue I felt was much like the video game, especially between the Prince and Princess, it was humorous, and playful while at the beginning they hated each other. It’s the same love story over and over, but with a twist at the end.

Quick Plot Synopsis:

Prince was adopted off the street by the King. King as a younger brother who saved the King’s life when they were kids. King has two other boys.

Prince grows up to be the King’s favourite “son.” The brothers are close.

The prince brothers attack a holy city under false pretenses. The city holds a secret.

Ben Kingsley. He can do what he wants really. He's Ben fucking Kingsley.

Prince gets a dagger that controls time. Dagger and something in the city could alter everything.

Someone wants the dagger to rule Persia himself.

Prince spends the movie with Princess trying to keep the dagger from the bad guys, find out who wants to take over the kingdom by going back in time.

This what the movie is about. I tried to be vague, give you an idea without ruining it.

All in all I felt the performances were good. Remember this is one of those fantastical movies, where you need to suspend disbelief in order to enjoy it correctly. Do you have needed to play the video games? Not really. There are a few inside things that fans of the game will get, but aren’t integral to the movie. You can enjoy this movie as a movie. One of the things that the game has a lot of is puzzles. There aren’t a lot of puzzles in the movie, but when there are, the camera does what it does in the game which I thought was cool. The camera shows you the integral components to solve the puzzle and the end goal, but HOW to do it is left up to you, The Prince, to decide. Same thing in the movie, it was a nice little nod.

Jake definitely LOOKED the part of the Prince which was awesome. Except…I didn’t know Persian’s were British. A quick skim over Wikipedia and I couldn’t see any historical evidence that the British ruled Persia, which by the way at one point covered 8.2 million square kilometers. That’s fucking huge.

This is a “theater movie.” It needs to be seen in a theater.

The action was good, the story was good. The set pieces were amazing. Some of the shots in the film were amazing. It was a good fun time at the movies. I was smiling at the end. The end is sort of predictable, but, not really.

If you are looking for a good time at the movies, and you ladies like to see Jake Gyllenhaal with no shirt on, or very little shirt. Go see it. I will say it is worth the $12 or $13 price tag to get in. You have to like these kinds of action/adventure movies. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a cinematic masterpiece, but its a good movie.

PS: I know Legion recently came out on DVD/Blu-Ray…DO NOT SEE IT!! Just don’t…so bad.