Situated Dance

Rating: Null/10 (3 June 2010)

I seem often at odds with the mainstream reviewer community when it comes to big summer action movies.
The press doesn't like this. The gameboy community does, I suppose because any sort of serious recognition outside the shell is valued.
Well, I liked it. I'll recommend it, though only on cinematic grounds; I know nothing of the games on which it is based.
When I go to these, my values are specific: I am going for a cinematic experience, period. The story is largely irrelevant: I need it to be enough to provide a linear skeleton on which to pace my visual imagination. It provides a rhythm of concepts only. This is not a trivial requirement, and is dependent on all the normally valued qualities: the actors, dialog, empathy and so on. You cannot have too much or too little story. It has to know its place in support of a deeper experience. There must, must, must not be too much condescension or elaborate justification of the worlds.
So far as the story, this suits and nearly achieves a very high mark. The only problems were the overdeveloped notions of fraternal allegiance. Someone crept into the studio at night with the notion that they could say something that matters, so they larded something "important" onto the script. This could better have been handled in the "Lion King" way, without the Shakespearean aspiration and actor.
So the story gives a pace of ideas, and it also supports the creation of a cosmology. This is far more important to these films. We have to just get how the world works. Once we do, our minds fill in the blanks of sense and what we expect to see. The situation we accept is what allows the narrative unfolding to work. They did a very good job here. That is despite two dangerous problems.
I know a great deal of Persian history, and of course this has nothing to do with that rich reality, richer and more magical than is imagined here. And there was a cosmological quandary in the central magical device. It would have reversed time while destroying the world, but the destruction would be in a future that would be erased. Huh? But even picky me easily skipped over those otherwise barbed snags.
Those two foundations did well enough in setting up the cinematic experience. In just the past couple years, all of Hollywood has developed a new sense of space. This may be related to the rush to 3D, but that is primarily an anti-piracy measure. Real filmmakers have just simply developed new spatial tools as the SFX compositing software allows for radical camera sweeps and editing continuities. This makes some of the new crop of action movies spatially cinematic.
We are lucky enough to see some exciting experiments in how this will play out. Here is an approach dear to my heart. The camera is conservatively used; it is not placed in the action. It always has us as a disembodied, prescient observer. I like the blend, but we do not have it here.
In other experiments, we use space in a large unconstrained way. Dragons swoop, Nemo swirls. King Kong falls. There is very little of that here, and in fact there is a cinematic parody of this in the "sands" effect at the end. What we have instead is a complex, detailed, accurate spatial interaction with the architectural spaces. The characters — mostly our Prince, but also some Jedi Ninja Magi — establish the planes and occlusions with an understanding of the new cinematic vocabulary we have, a collaboration between our minds and the software (based on surfaces, luminescence and occlusions). There is a dance between object and situation that simply thrills me.
It may thrill you as well.
Gemma is wonderful. I do not expect her appeal to last. She may be as shortlived as Sean Young, or possibly have a couple years like Liv Tyler. But here, she shines, acting with her neck. Wonderful.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.