Movie Double Bill - Prince of Persia / 2012

So I wasn't in the mood for anything too challenging tonight so I dug out some movies I hadn't yet got around to seeing. There will be spoilers for these movies - consider yourself warned.

Prince of Persia

No, not this guy.

Not this guy either.

But this guy.

So let's start with the things this movie did right.

It looks great. The visuals are fantastic start to finish. The action scenes are pretty cool too. The casting... well, it shouldn't work but it does. The leads are not my problem here - they both suit the roles they were given well. They are asked for anything too demanding and they deliver with some style. They're both pretty easy on the eyes for whomever may find them attractive too.

No, it's the supporting cast and their collection of oddly British accents that puzzle me. Even Gyllenhaal seems to be putting on a British accent at times. Ben Kingsley is pretty much obviously the villain from the first moment he's on screen. But most puzzling / entertaining of all is Richard Coyle as Prince Tus. I had trouble accepting Jeff from Coupling as a Prince of Persia.

The other major thing they did right was to keep the inevitable release of the Sands of Time to the very end of the movie. While turning all other characters except for one into a sand monster early on worked for the game, it would have sucked for the movie. And it made for a suitably tense confrontation at the end of the movie.

So, onto the bad things. There are only two things I really didn't like. One is somewhat minor but it bugs me. Dastan is warned that if the Dagger is inserted into the Sand-glass and the gem pressed, then the Sands will be released and destroy everything. But when this actually happens, the Dagger's magic also rewinds time and when it's all over everything's fine. So other than the Big Bad's plan depending on reversing time why is the release of the Sands such a big deal? It automatically got rewound!

The other is just the lack of direction in the movie. Until the last act when the lead characters have a clear purpose again, they spend most of the movie wandering from action scene to action scene. Sure, they occasionally talk about what is they're trying to achieve but it's not until they finally set out to stop the bad guy from pulling off his Grand Rewind that it feels like the movie has finally gotten into gear for the first time since the opening battle.

Overall, it was an enjoyable film but a forgettable one. It did successfully avoid the usual mistakes of a video game movie for the most part which is a major point in it's favour.

2012

Not too much to say about this one. Your standard run of the mill disaster end-of-the-world movie. Again, wonderful visuals - the best end of the world natural disasters that Hollywood render farms can provide.

I'm not even going to talk about the science of the end of the world - the dodgy science in movies like this and The Core are the basic concepts you have to give them for free, no matter how stupid they are. You shouldn't even be watching these movies if you can't give them that.

But it also suffers from a lack of direction really - you watch characters escape over the top natural disasters one after another while vague hints of where this is all headed get dropped. But it stills feels like a waste of time really - if the entire planetary crust is shifting and  collapsing, where can they go? I have to give the writers some credit for trying the Ark Spaceship fake-out though. And some credit for the fact that the actual way out for humanity is much less far fetched and somewhat more realistic in the giant ark ships they build to wait out the apocalyptic weather in, so they can repopulate the Earth after the dust settles. I did feel a little cheated since the earlier parts of the movie made me think that the planet was irrevocably fucked, but movies like this need their happy ending.

But until they arrive at the Ark, the movie just wanders. At least in some movies of this type - Deep Impact, Armageddon, for example - there's a clear task to attempt to save the world: blow the shit out of that asteroid. By the way almost all asteroid movies ever? If you've left it get that close, then it's too fucking late to blow it up.

Anyway, the movie gets it's suitably heroic ending and everything's as happy ever after as it can be on a totally thrashed, plate-shifted, magnetic-pole flipped planet. Only the unrealism of Hollywood allowed anybody at all to survive a disaster of this scale really. But it's as good a planet as any to start up human civilisation I guess.

To sum up, its a natural disaster movie that sets out to outdo any natural disaster movie you've seen before and pretty much succeeds. It's still yet another natural disaster movie though so it's slightly better than average at best.