A little more than a month has passed since I played through Prince of Persia The Sands of Time and while I haven’t made much progress playing the newest PoP title, Prince of Persia The Lost Crown, I did manage to track down a copy of the Sands of Time film and give it a rewatch.

Side Note: PlayStation randomly dropped a new God of War side-scroller, The Sons of Sparta, which has had me pretty consumed lately. Also, I had a guitar gig which was incredible but took up a lot of my time!

This film is, more or less, my only other connection to the Prince of Persia franchise, as I never played any of the other games.

I’ll be honest, I have pretty little memory of what was going on in my media consumption back in 2010 — if my notes are accurate, this is the only art from that year I’ve talked about on the blog so far — that was mid college, and before I had a goodreads account, so . . . a real dark ages scenario overall.

In any case, I remember being quite pleased with the movie, and thinking it was actually pretty solid when compared to other video game film adaptations.

My thoughts about the film haven’t changed too much.

In 2026, I am mostly interested in just how many little visual allusions the movie made, not to previous Prince of Persia games, but to the Assassin’s Creed franchise, which many people believe is a kind of spiritual successor to PoP.

At one point in the film we see Gyllenhaal standing at the end of a beam-like structure, high above the city streets, of which the viewer can take in the surrounding environs before making the infamous leap of faith central to the AC franchise.

Also, during one of the MANY action sequences, we see Dastan (Gyllenhaal) emerge from the shadows on a ledge, jumping down, feet forward, arms spread in a V. This is of course more visual language that anyone even remotely familiar with the two (maybe three?) AC games out at the time would have recognized as homage.

Finally, just the sheer amount parkour — choreographed by the founder of the sport/discipline David Belle — within the movie, was another constant reminder of the AC franchise, of which parkour is a hallmark.

Dastan’s positioning as an orphan, raised out of poverty by the king for his bravery and good deeds was also a striking inclusion in the prince’s backstory. To my knowledge, nothing like this was present in the Sands of Time game, although by the time this movie came out, several other PoP games for PS2 and PS3 were out, which I’ve never played, so perhaps this element was scraped from one of those games?

In any case, I suppose the prince’s backstory more or less had to be created whole-cloth, as the prince isn’t even given a name in the Sands of Time video game.

Jake Gyllenhaal is an interesting choice to play Dastan. Up until this point, I don’t think he had played many action-oriented roles. His credits that most stick out before PoP are October Sky, Donnie Darko, and Bubble Boy. Broke Back Mountain and Jarhead probably would have also been top of mind for folks watching this in 2010; however, I still haven’t seen either, so I’m not sure what bearing they’d have on this movie.

Honestly, maybe very little. Gyllenhaal seems to have a pretty varied stable of roles, each kind of niche. I half wonder if PoP was an attempt to make something a bit more mainstream, but one that ultimately was perhaps just another niche. Something fans of the game would go see and remember fondly, but by no means a massive success (although I’m seeing on wikipedia that it was the highest grossing video game adaptation until 2016 when the Warcraft movie beat it out, so . . . I guess still pretty popular).

A lot of attention is called to Jerry Bruckheimer’s (producer) involvement in the film. He’d had two movies (Confessions of a Shopaholic and G-Force) come out since the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie (At World’s End) in 2007, and I think there was a sense, or at least an attempt at creating a sense, that this was going to be the NEXT Pirates style sensation. PoP seems to have fallen well short of that franchise both financially, and socially, however I couldn’t help but notice some connections between the films.

I’m thinking mostly of a particular scene in which princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton) plays into the perception of women being weak/fragile creatures and pretends to faint from heat stroke. When Dastan does the chivalrous (but predictable) thing and rushes over to revive her, she steals the macguffin and leaves Dastan to be captured by bad guys.

This fainting routine feels plucked directly from the Pirates franchise, and indeed — with some small variation — it was. The faint is legitimate at the beginning of the first Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) when Elizabeth Swan (Kiera Knightly), forced by the fashion of her time to wear an extremely constricting dress, literally cannot breathe during Commodore Norrington’s (Jack Davenport) prelude to a proposal. She then PRETENDS to faint later in the film in order to cause a distraction and give Jack and Will (Depp & Bloom) a chance to enact a rescue/escape. Then the bit is riffed on again — quite humorously — during the sequel, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) during a three-way sword fight (so cool) between Jack, Will, and Norrington. She hopes that they will stop fighting to revive her, but instead the three ignore her completely much to her offense and chagrin.

Elizabeth Swann is rated by Cracked as one of Hollywood’s saddest attempts at feminism, so pulling from the same bag of tricks probably does not win Princess Tamina any points, but I did think her character — and interaction with Dastan — was leagues above princess Farah in the original Sands of Time game.

Give Prince of Persia The Sands of Time a Watch?

Sure! I can’t say it’s a particularly deep movie; however, it is perfectly entertaining for what it is, and something of a breath of fresh air when it comes to video game adaptations, both leading up to this movie and since.

As a fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, I greatly enjoyed picking out the visual allusions to that series, and while prince Dastan’s epic adventure was not the epic financial or cultural success that the Pirates of the Caribbean movies were, it was interesting to see the long shadow those movies cast over the film.

All in all, I wouldn’t burry this one with the original game, beneath the sands of time.

That’s all I have for this week! Has anyone rewatched this one recently? Or have anecdotes or memories of seeing it back in 2010? What else where you excited about from that time? Would you ride an ostrich? (yes random, but there is an ostrich race in the movie hahah)

As per usual, please leave your thoughts and insights in the comments! I can’t wait to talk about his one!

Until next time!