Review of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) by Chads — 01 Jun 2010

Camel beats horse, that exalted emblem of the old west, in Sam Peckinpah's "Ride the High Country", because by the early-sixties, the cowboy was in transition, as the western genre was starting to demythologize itself.

A tamed frontier, the end-result of a successful Indian genocide, had rendered the cowboy useless, like the horse, suffering the ignominy of losing to a foreign mammal, and replaced by the motor car; the cowboy is reduced to security detail, in which two aging lawmen are hired to safeguard the gold from a mining camp.

"Ride the High Country" marked the beginning of an era, the era of industrialization. Ostrich beats horse in "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time", by which the flightless birds owned by Shiek Amar(Alfred Molina), a cowboy of sorts, are utilized for races, stealing the spotlight from cowboy's best friend in a usurpation which indicates the epoch that this reinvented western belongs to.

The horse is humiliated; the mighty horse supplanted, dislocated from its rightful arena within the context of a diegesis predicated on the video game, and not for the first time. "Joust" was a coin-operated arcade game created by John Newcomer, in which knights, armed with lances, battled each other on ostriches with nary a horse in sight.

Similar to the Peckinpah classic and Williams Electronics video game, the equine beast plays second fiddle to a lesser animal that is not indigenous to the western genre, especially in the scene where Amar, fearing that his entire flock of birds are lost, tenderly strokes a recovered ostrich's neck, which demonstrates the iron-clad bond previously reserved for man and horse.

Whereas "Ride the High Country" demystified the western, "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" debunks the traditional filmic arts, since myths now derive, more often than not, from pixels.