I guess I have a thing for movies with plots based on fantasy or magic. It never hurts to add some action scenes and a princess or two, either.

That’s a round-about way of saying I watched Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in the theater today.

Movies based on video games gener­ally tend to miss expec­ta­tions, but happily, I have never played the video game that this movie is based on. If you haven’t either, then here’s the gist: a magic dagger turns back time and uses some magic sand to fuel its time-circuits (okay, I was just kidding about the time-circuits). You can figure out the rest.

Here’s the impor­tant thing to note about movies that involve time-travel: no matter what happens, you can’t take it at face value because sooner or later some bloke will come along and undo all of it. And when the only thing stopping you is some lame threat involving sand-storms across the world, no one really gives a second thought to changing time as they please. Now if someone had said the entire space-time fabric would come unrav­elled causing the Universe to implode, that would have made them sit up and pay attention…

In case you were wondering, the hero’s uncle — the King’s brother — is the bad guy. And in case you don’t want to read the spoilers, skip the previous sentence. With that out of the way, here are the top four reasons why he’s the bad guy:

1. He is the prince’s uncle. Uncles seldom end up on the good side.
2. The prince claims that he is the only one he can trust. Er…yeah, right.
3. He has a pointy beard.
4. He has a name like “Nizam”.

Moving on, there’s the question of how long the movie really lasted, after all of the time-travel, I mean. Here’s what happens: the Persian army camps outside the city, attacks at dawn, after which the prince accuses the uncle of treachery. In a bizarre reaction, the uncle gives himself away by attacking the prince (why?) and gets himself killed in the resulting scuffle. The prince gets the girl. The end.

Finally, the action sequences seemed a little far-fetched, but enter­taining. Now if you weren’t satis­fied with this movie, there’s always the sequel. Any movie that has a colon in it and sounds like “X: blah blah” has a sequel coming in the near future.

If someone walking by asks you what time it is, he’s probably asking for the local time, so if you casually glance at your watch and reply that it is nine o’clock in the morning, that’s fine. But what if this person had been on the other side of the globe, and speaking to you over the phone? You’d have to qualify that with the time zone: it is nine o’clock in Seattle. Or whatever. It is not unrea­son­able to expect the other guy to figure out the time in his little town based on what you tell him.

(By now you’re probably wondering why this guy across the globe doesn’t have a clock of his own, but that’s besides the point.)

Now imagine that some all-powerful body declares that the time in Seattle shall be arbitrarily moved forward or backward by an hour at different times of the year. Now, when you tell that guy the time is nine o’clock in Seattle, he’d have to reckon that actual number of hours based on the time of the year.

People with power to declare the time are seldom satis­fied with creating mild confu­sion. The more the merrier, they say. So imagine that they convene a committee every year that gathers together in an expen­sive hotel, with over-priced dinners and spectac­ular service to decide when to move the time forward or backward. Sometimes, on a whim, they decide not to do it at all.

Of course, the guy on the other end of the phone would be pretty confused by now. Sure, he would have this little book that he would keep updating every year, so as to figure out the right time based on what you told him — but at times he would forget. He doesn’t sound like the brightest, you know.

Now I’ve forgotten what my original point was, and besides, this story sucks, so — “The End.”