It isn't often that a video game is so vivid, so involving..so enveloping, that it is looked on as a possible movie franchise on all those merits. Usually, just the action (Doom, Final Fantasy), or just the body (Lara Croft..Tomb Raider) or just some other one aspect makes for a great game, but an underwhelming movie. I had the pleasure of watching this movie in an early screening on Monday night, and it is definitely a step above and beyond the aforementioned videogames-turned-movies.
The hallmark from the very beginning of the Prince of Persia franchise (a primitive DOS programmed, side-scrolling adventure through a castle to rescue a locked-up princess) was not only having a great story, but telling it in such a way to keep the player in that world. This film, surprisingly enough, doesn't play out quite as closely to the video games as I had expected. Still, without spoiling either the games or this movie, I can say that it shows Jordan Mechner had full involvement in the movie. Many storytelling elements present in the 'Prince of Peria: The Sands of Time' video game can be found here, and made for a very entertaining romp through the vast lands of Persia.
I would say that my main gripe is the under-use of parkour, the running/fighting style the Prince deploys in the video games. This is a hard gripe to substantiate though, because of how difficult parkour is to execute, let alone master, nonetheless I had expected something resembling the wall-running, banner-ripping moves seen in the 'Sands of Time' video game trilogy. It's harder still to be too down on a little parkour, due to Disney's desire that this film would be the first in a Prince of Persia movie franchise, equal to or greater than the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' movie franchise. Therefore, I await with anticipation the creativity that more parkour would bring to the stories this most agile Prince can tell.
'Prince of Peria: The Sands of Time' gets 8 of 10 stars.

The movie is set in ancient Persia, which is now named Iran. This is a land with truly astonishing landscapes: deserts, canyons, craggy monument valleys and a mountain range that resembles the Himalayas. Fair enough, since Persia reaches “from the steppes of China to the shores of the Mediterranean,” but it's even more impressive since it's all within a day's journey from the capital city.

That city is ruled by the noble King Sharaman (Ronald Pickup). One day in the marketplace, he sees a brave young urchin defend a boy being beaten, and escape pursuit by running across rooftops. This is Dastan, who will grow up to be played by Jake Gyllenhaal. He's an orphan; his birth parents are two movies, the Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (1924) and Michael Powell (1940) versions of “The Thief of Bagdad.” Adobe photoshop lightroom 6 (dvd).

Dastan is adopted by the king, and raised with two brothers, Garsiv (Toby Kebbell) and Tus (Richard Coyle). The names of the movie's characters seem to have been created by a random-word generator. The king has a brother named Nizam (Ben Kingsley), first seen in a sinister closeup that could be subtitled, “I will turn out to be the villain.” He has a van Dyke beard and eyes that glower smolderingly.

Dastan is good at running on rooftops. He also can leap from back to back in a herd of horses, jump across mighty distances, climb like a monkey and spin like a top. This is all achieved with special effects, ramped up just fast enough to make them totally unbelievable. Fairbanks has a 1924 scene where he hops from one giant pot to another. He did it in real time, with little trampolines hidden in the pots, and six pots in that movie are worth the whole kitchen in this one.

Anyway, the evil Nizam insists that the Persian army invade the peaceful city of Alamut. This is a beautiful city surrounding a towering castle. King Sharaman has ordered the city not be sacked, but nooo, Nizam has secret information that Alamut is manufacturing weapons of mass destruction for Persia's enemies. (Poor Dick Cheney. He can't even go to a Disney swashbuckler without running into finger-wagging.)

Anyway, Dastan climbs the city walls, pours flaming oil on its guards, etc., and then encounters the beautiful Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton). She possesses the Dagger of Time, which is an honest-to-God WMD, since if it's switched on too long, all the sands of time will run out, and it's back to the Big Bang.

The plot involves portentous dialogue (“The only way to stop this Armageddon is for us to take the dagger to the Secret Guardian Temple”), which separate tiresome CGI sequences in which clashing warriors do battle in shots so brief we can see people getting whacked, but have no conception of actual physical space. Of course this must all lead to Tamina and Dastan fleeing from the evil Nizam, who has framed the lad for regicide.

Their flight brings them under the sway of the film's obligatory comic supporting character, Sheik Amar (Alfred Molina), a con man who runs rigged ostrich races, and those who have tried to fix an ostrich race will know that the bloody ostriches are impossible to reason with. My interest perked up with the prospect that Dastan and Tamina might try to flee by ostrich-back, but no luck. Imagine the scene! Gemma in foreground, Jake right behind her, compressed by telephoto, jerking up and down at terrific speed while sand dunes whiz past on the green screen in the background.

The irritating thing about special effects is that anything can happen, and often you can't tell what the hell it is. Dastan, for example, seems to fall into a vast sinkhole as the sand is sucked from beneath him at dizzying speed. Exactly how he is saved of this predicament isn't exactly clear.

Other key events are obscure. Ex4 to mq4 decompiler online free. It looked to me as if Garsiv was killed on two occasions, yet is around for the end of the movie, and I don't think the Dagger of Time was involved in either event. The workings of the dagger are in any case somewhat murky; when you push the button in its base, it makes you light up like Sylvester the Puddy Tat sticking a paw in an electric socket, and everyone fast-reverses into starting positions. How do people in movies always know how to do this stuff without practice?

The two leads are not inspired. Jake Gyllenhaal could make the cover of a muscle mag, but he plays Dastan as if harboring Spider-Man's doubts and insecurities. I recall Gemma Arterton as resembling a gorgeous still photo in a cosmetics ad. If the two actors had found more energy and wit in their roles (if they'd ramped up to the Alfred Molina level, say), that would have been welcome. Oh, almost forgot: Molina's ostrich racer is outraged at government taxes. If big government can't leave a man alone to race his ostriches, they're all Alamutist sympathizers.