Fans of big-trousered running-up-walls rejoice! We have the first promo clip for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, directed by Mike Newell and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Gemma Arterton, Ben Kingsley and Alfred Molina.
Oddly, the opening shot of Jake's Prince Dastan jumping from a tower seems to be completely lifted from rival videogame franchise Assassin's Creed, but the rest is pretty recognisable from Jordan Mechner's own series, with some fun-looking nods to the sliding and the jumping and the swinging and the fighting. The Dagger of Time looks good too.
There's an obvious Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-Goes-East tone to the proceedings, what with it coming courtesy of Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer. If this becomes a franchise and follows the games faithfully, Jake will become a badass goth for no apparent reason in part 2, and then start switching between "dark" and "light" personas in part 3. And he'll be replaced in part 4, which will be a new part 1. Do you see?
And it's interesting that Jake seems to be doing a Johnny Depp and affecting a (rather good) British accent. Is that out of fidelity to the rather plummy Dastan from 2003's first game of the rebooted series (it started life as a 2D platformer in 1989), or just to sound consistent with the rest of the overwhelmingly Brit cast?
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is currently set for release on May 28 2010, and will be hoping to break the videogame-to-movie curse by actually being rather good.