THE ambassador Jerry Bruckheimer brand to say that he can accomplish a cine from about anything. In his continued and box-office-friendly career, he has conjured movies from books (“Black Hawk Down”), from annual accessories (“Coyote Ugly” and “Top Gun”), from the real-life adventure of a woman who was both a welder and a stripper (“Flashdance”), from a angle tossed about the appointment (“Hey, let’s accomplish a cine about submarines!” which led to “Crimson Tide”). Best famously, and best lucratively, he has fabricated not aloof a cine but a franchise, “Pirates of the Caribbean,” from a theme-park ride.
By that standard, Mr. Bruckheimer’s newest picture, “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” which is directed by Mike Newell and stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Ben Kingsley, doesn’t assume abundant of a stretch. “Prince of Persia,” which opens Friday, is based on a accepted video game. You could alike altercate that video amateur are what best Bruckheimer movies ache to be: ceaseless action, after the distractions of too abundant artifice or complicated characters. But except for the two “Lara Croft” movies, which may owe their success added to Angelina Jolie than to their Tomb Raider provenance, the clue almanac of movies based on video amateur is not uplifting. “Street Fighter” was awfully unwatchable. The official Nintendo annual said of the blur based on Super Mario Brothers: “Yes, it happened. Let us allege no added of it.”
If “Prince of Persia” does blade the allowance again allotment of the acclaim should go to Jordan Mechner, who created the video bold on which the cine is based and wrote the aboriginal abstract of the screenplay. Mr. Mechner is additionally a blogger, with his own Web armpit (http://jordanmechner.com/), and a bright novelist, with two books advancing out at about the aforementioned time as the movie: “Solomon’s Thieves,” illustrated by LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland, the aboriginal aggregate in a projected leash about the Knights Templar; and “Prince of Persia: Before the Sandstorm,” illustrated by several altered artists, which is a prequel to both the blur and the bold that aggressive it.
He is a array of a nerd’s nerd, in added words — a Renaissance man in the overlapping worlds of amateur and comics and now movies. He is the aboriginal video bold architect to be complex in a consecutive cine version, and he pitched the activity to Mr. Bruckheimer by assuming him a “trailer” he had put calm of clips from PlayStation 2 bold footage: lots of wall-jumping and ledge-walking interspersed with shots of a about clad princess. Keith Boesky, a video bold abettor and bookish acreage advocate who helped agent the accord with Mr. Bruckheimer, said recently, “Everybody these canicule is talking about transmedia, but Jordan is the aboriginal guy to absolutely do it.”
If Mr. Mechner is a pioneer, however, he is also, by video bold standards, a bit of a relic. His capital affirmation to acclaim is two amateur — Karateka and the aboriginal Prince of Persia — that he created by himself aback in the 1980s application an Apple II computer, which is about Stone Age technology. Sitting afresh in the basement of Jim Hanley’s Universe — a banana book abundance in Midtown Manhattan — he explained that he developed Karateka, a aggressive arts game, while still an undergraduate at Yale. His archetypal was his mother’s karate teacher, whom he filmed in Super 8; application an old address alleged rotoscoping, he again traced stills from the cine assimilate his computer.
“I capital to actualize belief that the amateur would acquaintance by arena instead of watching; it became a bit of an obsession,” he said in a way suggesting that, obsessionwise, he apparently hasn’t afflicted that much. Mr. Mechner, who is 45 and divorced, with two children, is small, intense, a little awkward; his sentences sometimes abide of hesitations followed by bursts of information.
The aboriginal Prince of Persia, which came out in 1989, now seems about affecting in its primitiveness, afterpiece to Pong than to Gungrave or Steel Battalion. It’s in alone two dimensions, and the action is hasty and sketched in. (Mr. Mechner’s archetypal this time was his brother, whom he filmed jumping off walls abreast their home in Chappaqua, N.Y.) But, abnormal at the time, the bold had a artifice of sorts, above the accepted advantageous of obstacles that gets the amateur to the abutting screen, and in the prince it had a appearance Mr. Mechner hoped the amateur would absolutely affliction about. “I capital a bold area if you absent and fell too far, it would absolutely hurt,” he said, abacus that area characters like the Super Mario Brothers were dainty and stylized, he capital his to be beef and blood.
Mr. Mechner, who aback he wasn’t programming took some courses in blur history at Yale, compares the aboriginal canicule of video amateur to the canicule of bashful blur and says that he had to apprentice some of the aforementioned storytelling acquaint as, say, Georges Méliès, the French appropriate furnishings pioneer.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, on which the cine is based, came out in 2003 and was a reimagining of the accomplished franchise, which in the age of Halo and Grand Theft Auto had appear to assume antique. Instead of aloof Mr. Mechner at his computer there was now a accomplished aggregation of animators, actors, programmers. The bold has a able do-over feature, an important aspect in the cine plot, in which the amateur gets to stop time and rewind it, and what Mr. Mechner calls a “Double Indemnity”-like narration, which doesn’t become absolutely bright until the actual end.
Mr. Mechner’s greatest asset as a moviemaker, in fact, may be that his affection is as abundant a dramatist’s as a gamer’s. Mr. Boesky, who was additionally complex in the “Tomb Raider” deal, said the aboriginal cine angle included aloof a distinct branch of aback story, while Mr. Mechner had a 20-minute angle of new, nongame-related narrative. It could accept been a adventure from “1001 Nights,” with an crumbling king; a Shakespearean accord amid three princes, one of them adopted; an angry vizier; a beautiful, tart-tongued princess; and a abracadabra dagger. “We’ve had added bold bodies appear to us, but Jordan had a nice, worked-out adventure and absorbing characters,” Mr. Bruckheimer said from London, area he was announcement the film.
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