The game's afoot: first Prince of Persia and now Warcraft head for the big screen

28 July 2009

Gerard Wood

With very few exceptions, adaptations of video or computer games for film have been trivial at best and for the most part unwatchable, so as a rule I don’t get excited when news breaks of yet another game due to receive the big screen treatment. But if there are two things we know about rules it’s that there are always exceptions and they're made to be broken, and so it is that my prejudice about video game adaptations is under serious threat on two fronts: Prince of Persia and now Warcraft.

While news of the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced adaptation of UbiSoft’s video game Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time can’t be described as breaking given that filming has progressed to post-production and we’re looking at a 28 May 2010 release, it’s really only been the recent release of stills and footage that has finally grabbed my attention. Quite simply, it looks superb.

To be fair there’s always been a lot going for this project. For a start it has an accomplished and versatile director in Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco to Four Weddings and a Funeral) who, despite an almost impossible ask, did a fair job of bringing the fourth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, to the screen. Interestingly Newell is also slated as director of the long anticipated adaptation of Terry Brooks’ The Elfstones of Shannara, although this project seems to have slipped quietly into the abyss like so many others. Judging from the footage and stills of Prince of Persia, it appears as if Newell has once again done the almost impossible by fleshing out the game’s emphasis on action and acrobatics with some real substance. This was always going to be the main challenge for this project as the game was far more about acrobatics than it was about plot (despite the magical manipulation of time and convoluted time lines).

The movie script is based on the 2003 video game of the same name and was written by a team of four - Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro, Carlo Bernard and Jordan Mechner, the original game’s creator (back when it was an MS-DOS and Macintosh game), and while committee based screenwriting can be a disastrous clash of egos, it seems that four fertile imaginations in collaboration might just have paid off in this case.

Last but not least, the cast includes a strikingly fit Jake Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko, Rendition) very much looking the part as Dastan, the story’s street urchin turned prince in 6th century Persia. Sir Ben Kingsley (too many superb roles and movies to mention) plays the villainous Nazim, and Gemma Atherton (Quantum of Solace) is Princess Tamina, who with Dastan sets out to retrieve the Sands of Time, a magical hourglass that in the game at least turned all living creatures into monsters. From what I can tell, the Prince’s mission in the movie is to retrieve the hour glass before Nazim puts it to use. Alfred Molina also makes an appearance as Sheik Amar, a mentor to Dastan.

If I wasted some hours on Prince of Persia, I lost months building my forces and waging war in Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft universe back when it was a real time strategy game. Set in a Tolkien inspired universe in which the Alliance forces of Humans, Dwarves, Draeni, Night Elves and others do battle with the Orc, Troll and Blood Elf Horde and their allies, Warcraft was fantasy based war gamming at its best. I’m not ashamed to admit my excitement when last Wednesday Blizzard Entertainment and Legendary Pictures announced that Sam Raimi has been handed the (war) helm of their forthcoming live-action Warcraft movie. Raimi has well proven he can handle blockbuster material with the Spider Man franchise, but it’s his earlier work, the Evil Dead and especially Army of Darkness that convinces me he is the man to bring the forces of the Horde and the Alliance to epic life. Blizzard went to great effort over the years developing the scenario in which Warcraft took place and it’s pleasing to hear from Raimi that “At its core, Warcraft is a fantastic, action-packed story.”

On the choice of Raimi as director, Paul Sams, chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment, had this to say: “Blizzard Entertainment and Legendary Pictures have a shared vision for this film and we searched at length to find the very best director to bring that vision to life. From our first conversation with Sam, we could tell he was the perfect choice. Sam knows how to simultaneously satisfy the enthusiasts and the mainstream audience that might be experiencing that content for the first time."

No release date for the movie has been announced, but word is that Raimi will oversee development of Warcraft and shoot the picture after he completes work on Spider-Man 4, which is scheduled to begin early 2010. So, all things being equal, we're probably looking at a late 2011 release, though perhaps that's just wishful thinking on my part.

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