Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
Not nearly as bad as I'd expected. Actually, as a filthy liberal, I enjoyed the subplot of an established global power invading a non-threatening minor nation based on fabricated evidence, with the real goal being to attain ready access to a huge underground vein of unsurpassed power.
My only disappointment with the political subtext was that the desert libertarian tribe didn't manage to have a catastrophe in which their no-tax society utter collapsed or was otherwise subjugated. I guess I'm just happy to have an action movie with a clear liberal agenda.
I watched it in Japanese for the most part, so my kids could enjoy it. We got through about half the movie when I noticed the kids weren't watching, so I flipped it to English. I am not sure what I was expecting, but I was stunned to hear everyone in this ancient, Persian empire speaking with a British accent. Including Glylenhaal, who is American. I dunno, it's a Disney movie. I don't expect everyone to be speaking ancient Persian, but I don't know why the don't just let everyone go with their natural spoken accent, or standard American newscaster accent? I guess they wanted to unify on one accent, and someone on the set realized "old" and "empire," the first thing anyone thinks of is "United Kingdom." Or maybe "China," but that would have been too much of a challenge for most actors. So they went with a British accent.
Some of the composited action shots, particularly the early ones with the kid, look quite bad. The CG knife sequences, where the human is rendered in CG, almost a rotoscoped technique, looked poor. Some uncanny valley problem, likely.
For once, I actually liked the ending of the movie more than bulk of the movie itself. I should have seen it coming, and I more or less knew where it was going, but it was well-executed.
