His Dark Media › News › The Persian Gulf

Item published by ArcT on 20th January. 0 Comments.

The Persian Gulf

If you haven't seen Sherlock already (and if so, which planet are you on?*), think along the lines of what Daniel Craig did for James Bond, going back to the novels and discarding all the excess. Holmes at his best; deduction, skill and cunning. So can we hope the same of Prince of Persia? There are a great many problems with transcribing the events of a game into a film. Especially a game of Prince's calibre. It's just not the same the other way around; Lord of the Rings made a heap of money with various games, Transformers games were relatively successful (though quality remained debatable), and even Starship Troopers whiled away a few hours with semi-enjoyable bug-squishing antics.

But going the opposite way? That's a whole different kettle of bananas. The very first problem you'd come across is the motivation of the characters themselves, and the proof is in the pudding here. The Prince of Hollywood, Perisa is no longer a prince, but Disney's stock 'urchin adopted by a powerful family'. We can see where this is going already; a character who, while perhaps a little flawed, is basically good and is expected to overcome all odds in order to save the day, keeping his hair intact throughout. This, however, is not so with Ubisoft's Prince, whose original motivation was to be a self-centred moron with the glint of power in his eye.

Our second big hurdle is that while the main plot points are, according to various sources, similar to the Sands of Time series, we can't expect a film to be the same as a game itself. While I would personally love to hear Jake 'I-Wish-I-Could-Quit-You' Gyllenhaal say "No, no, that didn't happen" when the prince falls from a very high and rather inexplicably positioned ledge, I'm pretty certain I'll be left disappointed. The Prince series has always been a platform game (think Sonic or Mario in three dimensions), and it's likely that this won't be effectively transmitted to the film audience; how could it? Following Prince Gyllenhaal running up walls and jumping impossible gaps may well make a good game when you're controlling his movements, but it's likely to be rather boring for a cinema audience, whose only contribution to the film is the price of a ticket.

That brings us onto combat, as well. Reviews of Prince may have hailed combat as 'cinematic', but again, if it was filmed anywhere close to the game's design, the audience would be bored. And rightly so.

I suppose that so far, these seem rather cursory gripes. But the little things like viewpoint, characterisation and control are what make games so playable these days. If all you did was watch a game with no further input, it wouldn't even make it to the shelves, let alone off them. It's the experience of interacting with that main character that draws people in to playing games, but it's a very different experience to be entertained simply through the eyes of an invisible and impartial camera. To make the Prince so believable in Disney's upcoming replacement to the Pirates of the Caribbean series, they're going to have to pull something special out of the bag.

But by no means is this a bad thing. As far as we can see, this is the first legitimate foray into game-conversion that cinema has taken. While it's certainly possible that Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is going to be a mistake, there's one feature that's more than likely going to redeem the film no matter how it does at the box office: Disney have chosen one hell of a game to experiment with.

*Answers on a postcard to: The His Dark Media Newsroom, His Dark Media, The Internet.

Return to the top of the page, the archive, or the frontpage.