5.21.2010

Prince of Persia: Why Video Games Shouldn't be Movies

Okay, whew. My friends have told me I need to stop whining about how Jake Gyllenhaal is playing the Prince of, you know...Persia...so here's one last joke about it. This is perfectly okay because I reference practices of the Ottoman Empire (and bits mentioned in the Thousand and One Nights). Ironically, the skin color's about the one thing I'm not bothered by--fair skin is idealized in the East. Whatever's harder to get....

(Click for fullview)

Anyway, they're calling it 'Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time' which is the same name used for the original PlayStation 2 game. In this game, the Prince is a naïve little dumbass who listens to the (obviously evil) grand vizier and basically destroys his father's kingdom. The gameplay's a combination of hard-ass fighting and just as hard but oh-so-awesome because not many games include it wall tricks, the main reason having the sand dagger is so important: you're going to die. A lot.

I would have been interested in seeing a smart-ized version of the original story, where he's got to grow up fast and take some responsibility for being a dumbass (while running around all over the place and kicking serious ass), but this version.... The trailer actually has a shot of a cute ragamuffin leaping a roof.

Lame.

Not to mention it looks like it's going to be a CGI orgy, which brings me to the title of this post: with all those (totally sweet) revolutions in computer generated imagery, video game movies are just going to turn into a slutfest for (kickass) animation while ditching the idea of turning a video game with a halfway decent premise into a movie worth seeing.

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