The Tale of the Dead Prince

A budget of $150 million made it possible to recreate the East of the VI century, but could not revive the "Prince of Persia"

It was necessary for one of ours to screen "Prince of Persia" - Balabanov, for example, or Serebrennikov. In general, for someone who was brought up not only on an old computer game about a prince, not only on the children's film "Aladdin's Magic Lamp" and not only on the "Auction" album "Everything is calm in Baghdad", but most importantly, on Pelevin story "Prince of the State Planning Committee". All that can be said about Persian princes and computer games, Pelevin said: you don’t have to go to the State Planning Commission by trolleybus, there are secret passages there. The cutter in half can be on any subway escalator. The princess is only pixels.

Mike Newell's "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" is conceived as a giant cut in half: the film crashes down on the audience, greedily clanging with steel jaws and dragging viewers into a sandstorm of special effects and fights.

The hero of the film, Prince Dastan (which means "fairy tale, history"), is the adopted son of a wise ruler. The ruler picked up the boy in the bazaar, seeing how he performed a noble deed, and raised the adopted child along with real princes. Children grew up and went to conquer the world. In one of the campaigns, Dastan became the owner of a magical artifact, a beautiful dagger with sand in the hilt. When Dastan was accused of killing his adoptive father, the prince had to flee, and the princess of the conquered city followed him. The princess needs a dagger, the prince needs an honest name, so love between young people is inevitable. The dagger, as it turned out, can return its owner to the past, however, only for a minute. But there is a repository of the Sands of Time nearby ... In general, as the "Auktyon" sang: "A city of sand, a long wall, we have one construction site for centuries."

This parkour on stairs, roofs and sands of the 6th century would be best compared not to classic films about quicksand, impregnable walls and smart guys in bloomers. Classics like "The Thief of Baghdad" and "The Seventh Adventure of Sinbad" have nothing to do with it, "Prince of Persia" is not based on the tales of "A Thousand and One Nights", but on the tales of a thousand and one gigabytes. Rather, it looks like "Pirates of the Caribbean", even "Lara Croft, Tomb Raider" - except that Jake Gyllenhaal's chest is not as attractive as Angelina Jolie's bust. But the principle is the same: the fairy tale that is retold to children is not an ancient legend, but a computer game or an attraction in an amusement park. The new mythology is based on binary codes and the "run" and "run even faster" keys.

The most famous computer game adaptations - Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, Bloodrain - were surprisingly serene, as computer game adaptations should be. How can you translate verbs of motion? That's right. Perhaps the most successful film adaptation of the game to date is Christoph Gans' Silent Hill, a philosophical horror that plays itself. But there, in addition to the atmosphere, there was an idea. In "Prince of Persia" there are only landscapes, artifacts, textured actors and the producer's predilection for storm and onslaught.

“A human figure is running along the corridor. It is drawn with great love, even somewhat sentimental," these words from Pelevin's "Prince Gosplan" do not refer to the film "Prince of Persia", and not only because "The Sands of Time" is compared to the very first "Prince" evolved quite a lot. The figures in the film are drawn without any sentimentality, but this is always the case: the more pixels, the less room there is for feelings.

Director Mike Newell is perhaps one of today's most omnivorous writers: with equal ease he makes the next big Harry Potter, the small Four Weddings and a Funeral, and the medium-sized Love in the Time of Cholera. It is rather difficult to find something uniting in these films, some kind of author's style, a specific sense of humor, some predilections. The only thing that unites Mike Newell's films is the feeling of deep satisfaction with which the director says about each of his works: "Oh, it was very interesting to shoot."

Newell really doesn’t make films, but has fun as best he can: he suggested doing Potter as a “thriller in the spirit of Hitchcock”, one of the Young Indiana Jones episodes as Anna Karenina (“Let everything happen in front of a locomotive, it will be funny "). As for "Prince of Persia", Newell, of course, played the game - however, only when he found out that he was going to make a film, but he did not succeed. The director did not master the Prince's signature somersault, so he had to ask the assistants to play it out. In addition to the computer game, Newell drew on 19th-century French painting - drawings by Frenchmen who traveled across Arabia. This album was sent to him by producer Jerry Bruckheimer along with the script. And screenwriter Jordan Mechner, who once came up with the original Prince of Persia game, told Newell "amazing things about 6th-century Persia."

Perhaps the problem with "Prince of Persia" is that neither the computer toy nor the paintings contain a sufficiently fascinating story. It's even a good thing that Prince of Persia is made in the old-fashioned way in two-dimensional, otherwise the film would have looked like a perfect attraction, a mechanical beautiful insect. Newell himself says that the two-dimensionality of the film is due to the fact that "Prince of Persia" was made before the general 3D fashion, when "Avatar" had not yet fallen on the heads of the audience.

The characters in the film are wonderful if we talk about them as cartoon characters: Jake Gyllenhaal smiles almost like he once did in Donnie Darko. Actually, Donnie Darko himself, this thoughtful guy who talked to the hare about the end of the world and studied the concept of time in order to save the world, quite logically fit into Prince of Persia. Now that he has a magical dagger, he no longer needs a hare with a metal snout, nor the buzzword "concept".

The Prince's girlfriend is played by Gemma Arterton - Bond's Strawberry Fields from Quantum of Solace. Secondary characters, including a depressive ostrich, suicidal, look even more convincing than the main ones: Alfred Molina easily fits into any role, and the only complaint about Ben Kingsley is that he immediately shows how malevolent his character is. But this is how it should be, Newell is not talking about the concept of time here, but is telling a new fairy tale in a genre that the director himself calls "Bruckheimer's film". This producer is called "Mr. Blockbuster", and his films have earned a total of more than $ 15 billion at the box office. "The Bruckheimer Film" is something loud, exciting, while everyone who makes it has a lot of fun, and the project itself collects big money. Pirates of the Caribbean, by the way, is also a Bruckheimer Movie, and, like Prince, it has a PG-13 rating.

During the filming of "The Sands of Time" in Morocco, all snakes, spiders and scorpions were specially dispersed on the set, and then computer creatures were drawn into the film. This is very symbolic. It seems that filmmakers and producers have turned into owners of magic lamps in which genies are hidden. At the very first request, cute Hottabychs build giant computer cities on the sand, populate them with computer people, and then destroy it all themselves. But the scope of their capabilities is no longer as striking as the tales of the Thousand and One Nights. Even the Prince of the State Planning Committee thought more about life. But he received much less pleasure from her than Dastan.