One of the very few computer action games I got into was Prince of Persia, which involved a lot of running and jumping in a palace, with nice graphics by early 1990s standards. Coincidentally, this movie has the same name as that video game. Oh sure, the credits claim that the one is actually based on the other, and the game’s creator, Jordan Mechner even gets a story credit. But it’s not really any more based on it than Pretty in Pink was based on the Psychedelic Furs song. More like if the Disney people went to the guys who wrote the remake of The Uninvited and one of the guys who wrote Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights and said, can you write us a generic action thriller with a romantic angle called Prince of Persia? And it was done.
Of course, it’s very professionally done. The director is Mike Newell, who made maybe the best of the Harry Potter movies, Goblet of Fire. And the cast, led by an impressively beefed-up Jake Gyllenhaal, features Oscar winner Ben Kingsley (as the prince’s influential uncle). Gyllenhaal is the title character, a common boy adopted by the king and fated to lead the preemptive invasion of a holy city thought, though not proven, to have extremely powerful weapons. I have no idea whose idea it was to make the film an Iraq war allegory, but there it is, although most twelve-year-old boys will fail to notice.
The main plotline is the usual fantasy-film nonsense about a magic object that, if captured, will unleash a mighty wave of CGI effects the likes of which have not been seen since the last big-budget fantasy film. This is really too bad. The video game doesn’t supply much of a plot for the movie, but it does suggest a film in which running and jumping in a palace would play more of a role. There’s a little, but the occasional parkour sequences don’t top the ones in District B13 or Casino Royale.
As for the characters, they’re pretty standard. The ancient city is led by a plucky princess (Gemma Arterton). Ever since Star Wars, I guess, the plucky princess is a requisite character for this sort of movie. In the course of five minutes of screen time, she saves the prince, then tries to kill him. She is adversary and love interest, damsel in distress and woman of action, whatever. Meanwhile, the tone of the movie shifts from straight action to Romancing the Stone-style comedic adventure, as if different scenes had been assigned to different writers. (And indeed, several are credited.)
The result isn’t incoherent, but is disjointed. On the bright side are minor time-travel tricks, an impressive re-creation of some real sites in ancient Persia, and medium-good swordfighting. Not good enough to recommend though.
IMDB link
reviewed 5/27/10
Showing posts with label ancient. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ancient. Show all posts
Friday, May 28, 2010
Friday, March 7, 2008
10,000 BC (**1/2)
Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what life was like 12,000 years ago? Suffice it to say that director Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day) likely didn’t burden himself with mounds of research in trying to depict his vision of things. (Unusually, Emmerich’s screenwriting partner, Harald Kloser, is the film score’s composer, making his first foray into words along with music.) The result is a hodgepodge of ideas that might have been gathered from surveying a group of high schoolers. Weren’t there mammoths back then? Yes, there were, and so Emmerich’s story envisions a legend, narrated by Omar Sharif, of Asiatic hunter-gatherers who may be doomed by their reliance on hunting beasts with legs the size of men. The hunting sequence in the first half hour of the movie is probably the most stirring. Later on, we also see some creatures that look like a kind of small dinosaur/bird hybrid.
The main story, though, concerns the efforts of one of the hunters (Steven Strait) to free others of his tribe who’ve been kidnapped by “four-legged demons” to the south. Principally, he aims to prove his loyalty to the beautiful Evolet (Camilla Belle), whose maidenhood is threatened at every turn. He braves every hardship to achieve this goal, not unlike the way Dennis Quaid did to rescue his son in The Day After Tomorrow. Besides that, his trek affords the filmmakers to show all manner of terrain, from ice and snow in the beginning to forest, and to desert, and then to gather up a multicultural lot to fight a final battle, not unlike the militia Mel Gibson gathers up in Emmerich’s The Patriot. They wind up finally in a place that seems like Egypt, complete with what appears to be a pyramid being built some thousands of years before historians tell us that happened, but hey, who knows?
As for the women, we see about three of them. Apparently, their main role was to stir the courage of young men (or the loins of older men) or to serve as seers. The plot’s reliance on the gifts of one such sorceress is perhaps the thing that I found most tedious about the tale, but I admit I have a low threshold for such fancies. Ultimately, 10,000 BC is best enjoyed as a special-effects spectacle, like Emmerich's contemporary films, only with the characters using dialogue like “I am through with days.”
IMDB link
viewed 3/8/08; reviewed 3/17/08
The main story, though, concerns the efforts of one of the hunters (Steven Strait) to free others of his tribe who’ve been kidnapped by “four-legged demons” to the south. Principally, he aims to prove his loyalty to the beautiful Evolet (Camilla Belle), whose maidenhood is threatened at every turn. He braves every hardship to achieve this goal, not unlike the way Dennis Quaid did to rescue his son in The Day After Tomorrow. Besides that, his trek affords the filmmakers to show all manner of terrain, from ice and snow in the beginning to forest, and to desert, and then to gather up a multicultural lot to fight a final battle, not unlike the militia Mel Gibson gathers up in Emmerich’s The Patriot. They wind up finally in a place that seems like Egypt, complete with what appears to be a pyramid being built some thousands of years before historians tell us that happened, but hey, who knows?
As for the women, we see about three of them. Apparently, their main role was to stir the courage of young men (or the loins of older men) or to serve as seers. The plot’s reliance on the gifts of one such sorceress is perhaps the thing that I found most tedious about the tale, but I admit I have a low threshold for such fancies. Ultimately, 10,000 BC is best enjoyed as a special-effects spectacle, like Emmerich's contemporary films, only with the characters using dialogue like “I am through with days.”
IMDB link
viewed 3/8/08; reviewed 3/17/08
Friday, March 9, 2007
300 (***)
? The title refers not to bowling, but to the number of Spartan soldiers who, with few allies, fought an overwhelmingly numerically superior invading Persian army at Thermopylae some 2500 years ago. Directed by Zack Snyder (2004’s Dawn of the Dead), 300 takes as its source a graphic novel by Frank Miller (Sin City) and Lynn Varley. Miller, in turn, was inspired by 1962’s The 300 Spartans, which told the same story. Gerard Butler plays the fearsome Spartan king Leonidas, who spends much of the movie bare-chested, and Lena Headey his loyal (and nearly as fearsome) wife, who spends much of the movie trying to persuade the city-state’s council to send further reinforcements.
+ Unlike, say, Gladiator, 300 leans much more in the direction of action movie than history lesson or character drama. Its tight structure makes movies like Troy seem flaccid and overblown. Take, for example, the voiced-over introduction, depicting in a couple of minutes Leonidas’s boyhood immersion in the militaristic culture of his homeland. It’s at once over-the-top, captivatingly scary, and concise. Although not in the overt comic-book style of Sin City, most of the backgrounds are computer-generated so as to provide a slightly otherworldly look. When, early in the movie, Leonidas climbs a giant rock to seek the council of the Oracle of Delphi, the angle of ascent seems just on the impossible side. Leonidas himself appears to be nearly a giant, and Butler’s superb performance enhances the illusion. It’s easy to see why his men were so loyal. Although the meticulous depiction of violence is what will bring out the audience, the key plot elements are intelligently presented so as to make the strategy and the timeline of the battle understandable.
- I feared this might be a triumph of style over substance, and it isn’t, but it might be said that it’s a triumph of certitude over moral complexity. There may be practical value, and even glory, in the willingness to sacrifice oneself to a cause, but you get the feeling here that Leonidas’s men, as portrayed here, see glory in death itself. They can hardly be said to be brave, because they seem fearless. I saw a parallel with the Japan of World War II. In a sense, 300 embraces the death-before-surrender ethos that Letters from Iwo Jima implicitly criticized. To go along with this attractive vision of a warrior culture, 300 also emphasizes the Spartan contempt for “inferior” individuals. One of the ways the movie departs from strict realism is in featuring exaggerated human grotesqueries, none of whom is portrayed positively. The Spartans are shown to kill abnormally formed babies at birth, but in one scene a hunchback of cartoonish proportions appears. He offers to fight for Leonidas, but the great king says that he is useless. On the Persian side are, among others, a robotic giant and a person with, where an arm should be, a fin used to execute. The Persian leader, Xerxes, looks like a transvestite with a piercing fetish. (Admittedly, the imagery is striking.) The masses of Persian soldiers are portrayed as nearly inhuman hordes, and the Spartans clearly feel superior to other Greeks as well. Leonidas and his men are cast as proto-democratic freedom fighters, but that’s a stretch. It might not be fair to judge ancients by modern standards, but 300 mythologies its subjects to such an extent that it appears to endorse attitudes that, should they pause consider them, many in the audience might well find repugnant.
= *** Notwithstanding the above reservations, cinematically 300 delivers the goods and probably met the testosterone-fueled expectations of the startling number of people who went to see it on its opening weekend.
IMDB link
reviewed 3/16/07
+ Unlike, say, Gladiator, 300 leans much more in the direction of action movie than history lesson or character drama. Its tight structure makes movies like Troy seem flaccid and overblown. Take, for example, the voiced-over introduction, depicting in a couple of minutes Leonidas’s boyhood immersion in the militaristic culture of his homeland. It’s at once over-the-top, captivatingly scary, and concise. Although not in the overt comic-book style of Sin City, most of the backgrounds are computer-generated so as to provide a slightly otherworldly look. When, early in the movie, Leonidas climbs a giant rock to seek the council of the Oracle of Delphi, the angle of ascent seems just on the impossible side. Leonidas himself appears to be nearly a giant, and Butler’s superb performance enhances the illusion. It’s easy to see why his men were so loyal. Although the meticulous depiction of violence is what will bring out the audience, the key plot elements are intelligently presented so as to make the strategy and the timeline of the battle understandable.
- I feared this might be a triumph of style over substance, and it isn’t, but it might be said that it’s a triumph of certitude over moral complexity. There may be practical value, and even glory, in the willingness to sacrifice oneself to a cause, but you get the feeling here that Leonidas’s men, as portrayed here, see glory in death itself. They can hardly be said to be brave, because they seem fearless. I saw a parallel with the Japan of World War II. In a sense, 300 embraces the death-before-surrender ethos that Letters from Iwo Jima implicitly criticized. To go along with this attractive vision of a warrior culture, 300 also emphasizes the Spartan contempt for “inferior” individuals. One of the ways the movie departs from strict realism is in featuring exaggerated human grotesqueries, none of whom is portrayed positively. The Spartans are shown to kill abnormally formed babies at birth, but in one scene a hunchback of cartoonish proportions appears. He offers to fight for Leonidas, but the great king says that he is useless. On the Persian side are, among others, a robotic giant and a person with, where an arm should be, a fin used to execute. The Persian leader, Xerxes, looks like a transvestite with a piercing fetish. (Admittedly, the imagery is striking.) The masses of Persian soldiers are portrayed as nearly inhuman hordes, and the Spartans clearly feel superior to other Greeks as well. Leonidas and his men are cast as proto-democratic freedom fighters, but that’s a stretch. It might not be fair to judge ancients by modern standards, but 300 mythologies its subjects to such an extent that it appears to endorse attitudes that, should they pause consider them, many in the audience might well find repugnant.
= *** Notwithstanding the above reservations, cinematically 300 delivers the goods and probably met the testosterone-fueled expectations of the startling number of people who went to see it on its opening weekend.
IMDB link
reviewed 3/16/07
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