Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time: The Movie, or An Object Lesson In Why Hollywood Can't Make A Decent Video Game Adaptation

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Above: The hands on hips pose makes Jake Gyllenhaal look like less like a fearsome 'Persian warrior and more like he's waiting impatiently for bar service at a leather club. Who does a boy have to blow to get a vodka and Red Bull in this place?

Over last weekend, when I was visiting my family and girlfriend in St. Louis, we all went out to see Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. My sister was the main person who was interested in seeing it, but I was kind of curious myself, seeing as this is probably the highest-profile and most expensive video game to movie adaptation to date, having been midwifed by blockbuster merchant du jour Jerry Bruckheimer in a thinly veiled attempt to replicate the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Plus, I've played the 2003 Xbox/PS2 game, which I enjoyed and is widely regarded as a minor classic to boot, so I had a pretty good point of comparison against which to judge it.

I'm not going to waste a lot of time reviewing the movie itself - it sucked, but if you saw the ads, you probably guessed that already. I would like to point out that while I admire Jake Gyllenhaal's ability to Bowflex himself into the $10 million dollar abs you see on display above, he's really not right for this type of part. Gyllenhaal works best when he can break out that look of slight naive confusion that he employed to such good effect in Donnie Darko and most-underrated-movie-evar Zodiac. He can't really conjure the mocking insouciance that his character in Prince of Persia is clearly intended to have. Come to think of it, most of the under-40 A-list male crowd in Hollywood these days is lacking in the smart-ass factor - that was always the weakest part of Tobey Maguire's performance as Spider-Man as well.

Anyhow, the point I want to raise is that adapting a video game into a crowd-pleasing blockbuster shouldn't be nearly as hard as the dismal results of the many attempts to do so would seem to indicate. As I see it, this is a classic Hollywood problem: lack of respect for the source material. Check out this trailer for the original Sands of Time game:

 
You can basically summarize what the game's like from it: you play as a prince who performs amazing acrobatic feats and can rewind time with a dagger powered by magical sand. He spends a lot of time swordfighting with monsters possessed by the same magical sand that powers his dagger. This is kind of a stupid plot, but the plot isn't really the point. The cool stuff you can do in the game is the point, and the plot is a means to that end.

The Prince of Persia movie, by contrast (I'd embed the trailer below for comparison, if it weren't for the fact that the trailer is pretty misleading about the actual content of the movie) does away with the idea of possessed monsters, barely has any time rewinding at all, and stages the action scenes mostly in spatially confusing medium-close shots stitched together with quick-cut editing. Most of the movie is divided between watching Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton walking through the desert and engaging in limply-written bickering, and listening to various characters spout boring expository dialogue about court intrigue and the rules for protecting the dagger. To add insult to injury, whereas the game was renowned for its lighthearted storybook aesthetic, the tone of the movie veers erratically between goofiness and self-seriousness. 

Prince of Persia would have been a much better movie if it had been built around the same stuff that went into the game instead of all the superfluous crap thrown in as a desperate attempt to have a story to focus on. Summer blockbusters get a lot of crap for being overly reliant on action set pieces, but I think that criticism speaks more to mediocrity of action set pieces these days rather than the basic template. Put it this way: Raiders of the Lost Ark is just a bunch of set pieces with the barest minimum of exposition connecting them, and everybody in the world loves that movie. Prince of Persia was obviously never gonna come close to that, but why not try? Why not hire some parkour experts to try and top the foot chase sequences in Casino Royale or District B-13? Why not keep the sand monsters idea and turn the swordfights into a PG-13 friendly version of the battles in 300? Who decided that this movie needed to be a slow-witted homage to Romancing the Stone? Making a video-game based blockbuster movie doesn't entail re-inventing the wheel, but it ought to entail a careful consideration of how to keep whatever made the game appealing in the first place in the film. 

Where The Wild Things Are review and thoughts on children's movies

Spike Jonze's film adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are is a masterpiece. The cinematography and art direction create visually stunning tableaus throughout the entire running time. The script is an evocative and nakedly emotional exploration of childhood. Max Records, the child actor who plays the main character Max, is note-perfect. The Wild Things, voiced to perfection by a variety of well-regarded actors and actresses, are completely convincing as characters and never come across as whiz-bang special effects despite the obvious technical virtuosity involved in their creation. The movie steadfastly avoids pat moralizing and tiresome postmodern wink-and-nudge reference smuggling. To sum, it's difficult to summarize Where The Wild Things Are as being anything besides a complete artistic triumph.

So why the hell do I feel so uneasy about it?

Where The Wild Things Are is an adaptation of one of the most famous children's books of all time. Presumably, it's very faithful to the source material. Re-reading children's books hasn't been a high priority of mine in my adult life, and I don't have any kids of my own, so my memory of the book outside of the more iconic images from it are a little hazy. However, it's been loudly praised by author Maurice Sendak, who served as a producer on the movie, and the quality of the production marks it generally as a far cry from the corpse-fucking live action Dr. Seuss movies from the beginning of the decade. Despite all that faithfulness and care, Where The Wild Things Are isn't a children's movie. It's a movie targeted largely, though by no means exclusively, to millenial hipster types. In some ways, it's probably the crowning achievement to date of that culture and ethos, partly because of the sheer breadth and wattage of the creators - Spike Jonze! Dave Eggers! Karen O! - but mostly because of how it zeroes in on the tension between childhood fantasy and adult emotional complexity that undergirds so much of the hipster zeitgeist.

But, unlike the book, it's not made for kids, and it's got nothing to do with the content of the film itself, which is straight down the middle PG stuff. I think that the real crux of the issue has to do with the inherent difference between books and movies as media. Children's books are mainly designed to give young kids a visually oriented story that they can, ideally, read with their parents. It's supposed to be a tactile experience, where the kid can go at his or her own pace, looking at the pictures, sounding out the words, and asking mom or dad about what's going to happen next before turning the page to find out. The whole process takes a half-hour, forty-five minutes tops. In contrast, watching a movie, especially in the theater, is a passive experience. The kid sits in the dark and watches things happen until the movie's over and then he or she can talk about it, because while it's going on, any talk will fetch a quick reprimand and annoyed looks from the nearby people in the audience. Even a short movie requires sustaining this for an hour and a half.

As a result, most kids movies are designed to give repeated manic bursts of attention-grabbing fun. This is a large contributor to why most kids movies are so unbearable to anybody over the age of 12. Take, for instance, the trailer for the upcoming Jackie Chan movie The Spy Next Door, which played before my showing of Where The Wild Things Are:


Looks terrible, right? The Spy Next Door, as near as I can tell, has the exact same plot as Vin Diesel's 2005 movie The Pacifier, which in turn had the exact same plot at Hulk Hogan's 1993 movie Mr. Nanny. There's probably three or four more identical movies in between those two that I'm just not aware of. The reason that Hollywood gets away with this is that the target audience is (a) not old enough to be cognizant of the fact that an identical movie was made just four years ago and (b) more concerned with high-spirited action and fun than plot, character, and originality.

That's not to say that ALL kids movie lack those things, of course. Pixar's entire output, and corresponding boffo box office numbers, are more than enough proof that kids can appreciate heartfelt characters and a well-crafted and resonant story. The thing of it is, though, is that Pixar's movies and other "quality" kids movies provide plot and heart without skimping on a generous dose of the action and funny antics that are the perpetual hallmarks of the form.

Where The Wild Things Are doesn't really have much of that. That's a credit to it as an artistic and thematic work; the film would have been a total abortion if it were reworked to include a wacky sidekick and an extended chase scene. Be honest, though: if you were 8 years old again, would you rather see a movie about a kung-fu expert, a sassy Average American family, and the dad from Hannah Montana, or one about a bunch of monsters sitting around in a forest talking about their feelings? Because the latter is literally the plot of Where The Wild Things Are.

I could be wrong about this. Despite the bluster of the preceding paragraphs, I don't really know that much about kids. Maybe they'll absolutely flip their shit for an allegorical psychodrama about childhood. Maybe they'll just groove on the cool creatures and pretty pictures and wind up liking it. In that case, hey, problem solved (more accurately, problem non-existent). I certainly think that Where The Wild Things Are will provide a hands-down more rewarding experience over the course of growing up than any one of the dozens of DreamWorks CGI movies produced each year. I'm seriously considering seeing it again just to enjoy the experience without wondering what the kids in the audience think about it in the back of my mind the whole time (after all, why should I give a shit?). But my gut tells me that Where The Wild Things Are is going to go over a lot of little heads. And wouldn't it be ironic if thousands of kids were to be bored to tears by one of cinema's greatest depictions of being a misunderstood child?