Prince of Persia Took All The Wrong Lessons From Pirates Of The Caribbean
Disney’s first failed video game adaptation has been lost to time.
Walt Disney Pictures has long been the king of animation, but with Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, it finally managed to conquer the live-action world. It wasn’t the first Disney film based on an attraction from the parks, bafflingly enough, but with the help of producer Jerry Bruckheimer, it was (and kind of still is) the only one to justify such a ludicrous stunt.
The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is a flagship property of the Disney brand to this day. It generated billions for the company and, perhaps more crucially, turned a whole generation of disillusioned teens into Disney fans for life. When the franchise seemed to come to an end in 2007, many naturally wondered if anything could step up to replace the franchise and all his supernatural swashbuckling. Fortunately, Bruckheimer had been quietly tinkering away at a potential successor for years. His production company acquired the rights to Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in 2003, and while Pirates of the Caribbean was conquering the box office, Bruckheimer labored with Disney to wrangle this video game into a viable narrative.
Prince of Persia is the definition of putting the cart before the horse. Disney first announced the film early in 2007, before solidifying a script or even selecting a director. Mike Newell, the filmmaker behind Four Weddings and a Funeral and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was eventually tapped to helm the film, while Jordan Mechner, the creator of Prince of Persia, stepped up to pen the script. On paper, Disney was taking all the right steps: it’d scored a tested fantasy filmmaker and the progenitor of the games. But the 2007-2008 writers’ guild strikes would cut any momentum short, forcing Disney to push Prince of Persia back to the summer of 2010.
Production would get up and running in 2008, and by all accounts, it went off without a hitch. Disney and Bruckheimer reportedly spent millions rushing the visual effects for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End and were determined not to make the same mistakes with Prince of Persia. That caution kept the film’s budget and production timeline relatively in check — but a new script from Mechner and three (!) other writers made for a disorganized adventure on camera.
Orientalist themes run rampant in Prince of Persia, undercutting the promise of the premise.
In hindsight, it probably didn’t help that Disney had tapped a gaggle of white actors to portray characters from the ancient Middle East. Jake Gyllenhaal is Dastan, a roguish orphan raised on the streets in the heart of Persia. As a child, his bravery and integrity caught the eye of the king, who adopted Dastan and raised him alongside his two sons. As an honorary prince of Persia, Dastan splits the difference between Pirates’ heartthrob Will Turner and the wackier Jack Sparrow: he doesn’t think like either of his brothers in battle, and he’s keen to save more lives than he takes, even if it means sparing the enemy.
His instincts come in handy when Tus (Richard Coyle), first in line to the throne, is persuaded to invade the holy city of Alamut. Persian spies claim that the Alamutians are selling weapons to the empire’s enemies — but in reality, they’re the stewards of a mystical dagger that has the power to turn back time. Someone wants this dagger more than anything, and they’ve carefully manipulated both kingdoms into battle to get it. When the king is poisoned and Dastan is named as the prime suspect in his demise, he finds himself on the run with the Alamutian princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton), the guardian of the dagger.
Dastan’s quest to clear his name and uncover the true enemy will take him on a journey across the Persian Empire, forcing him to call on all the skills at his disposal — his talents for parkour especially — to save the realm and thwart a temporal Armageddon.
An ironclad enemies-to-lovers romance wasn’t enough to give this film the boost it needed.
The concept of Sands of Time is, frankly, an ingenious device for an actioner on this scale. The dagger allows its wielder to go back in time for up to a minute, but there’s more mystical sand hidden somewhere in a “Sacred Guardian Temple” — and if it’s accessed, it will unleash the wrath of the gods upon the earth. All this is relayed in tedious bits and pieces by Tamina: Arterton thankfully gives all this exposition the necessary weight to keep the stakes of the film high, but she’s better used as the defiant foil to Gyllenhaal’s smarmy prince.
Prince of Persia’s fantasy themes are so large in scope, they threaten to swallow the movie whole. Things get more chaotic with Dastan’s ongoing quest to solve the conspiracy that murdered his father and prove his innocence to his brothers. The latter is largely an excuse to shoehorn some action into a relatively low-key quest narrative: Dastan trades blows with his other brother Garsiv (Toby Kebbell) whenever their paths cross, and it does get old fast. What gives Prince of Persia its true propulsion is Dastan’s internal hero’s journey, and the unlikely romance he kindles with Tamina. It’s the kind of sniping, enemies-to-lovers goodness that’d fueled countless adventures in the past — and it’s the sole thing propelling the film through its tangled adventure.
Prince of Persia never got the same acclaim as the franchise that started it all, but in hindsight, it deserves a second look.
Unfortunately, romance wasn’t quite enough to push Prince of Persia into the upper echelon of Disney adaptations. It received mixed reviews when it finally bowed on Memorial Day weekend in 2010. Its bloated narrative, gauntlet of antagonists, and the Orientalist themes running rampant throughout undercut any escapist thrills it had to offer — and though Disney had hoped to turn this into its next big franchise, it was forced to cut its losses and return to the saga it knew best.
Pirates of the Caribbean lived on with two additional, misguided sequels, while Prince of Persia has more or less been lost to time. It’s become a cautionary tale about reverse engineering a franchise; 15 years on, it’s still got its flaws, but it’s surprisingly solid when it’s allowed to stand on its own.
