So, this weekend I saw Splice. I will be talking about it tomorrow, but it’s just not the sort of blog entry I want to face on a Monday. Especially since I also saw Dhoom 2 this weekend.

Dhoom 2 stars Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai, who had been paired to great effect in Jodhaa Akbar (despite Aishwarya’s lack of actual acting ability). I thought, “Well, they did well in the other one. Let’s check out Dhoom 2!”

Do you guys remember the first Mission: Impossible movie, when everyone had latex masks on all the time and they spent four hours just double-crossing each other and jumping around pulling off latex masks to reveal other latex masks and shooting bullets in an arc and running around and pulling off other people’s latex masks, and you spent the whole movie thinking, “What is wrong with these awful people in this movie I don’t understand?”

The maker of Dhoom 2 looked at that movie and said, “This is missing two things: dance numbers, and a man dressed up to look like the Queen. I can fix this.”

And so, Dhoom 2 was born, and the opening scene of Dhoom 2 is Hrithik Roshan parachuting down to a desert-crossing train (without being seen), dressing as the Queen Mother, stealing the Crown, and sandboarding to safety.

Then, he has a musical number in a nightclub telling you what the themes of the movie are. (Bollywood, don’t ever change.)

The plot swiftly becomes one of those movies where the Cop on a Mission and the Thief on a Mission do a lot of homoerotic fixating on one another and put a woman in the middle just so it doesn’t look too gay – in this case, the double-agent thief played by Aishwarya. It almost works!

…almost.

(And please note that in the video below, half the time he’s staring longingly off-camera, Abhishek Bachchan is there. Just saying.)

There’s also a comedy-relief cop, and a pregnant harpy wife, and a fun-loving tropical lady, and a lady cop who’s been tracking the thief dude for years but immediately gets the case taken off her hands by Cop on a Mission, and is never heard from again, and Hrithik and Aishwarya do a lot of looking at each other in slow motion, and one of the heist scenes involves a lucky placement of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It’s just that kind of movie.

A lot of it, I admit, goes beyond fun-cheeseball and into painful-cheeseball, so if you’re looking to save time and wince-hours then you should probably just skip to Hrithik’s scenes all the time. His cheese is at least hilarious. (You’ll notice in the video below that sometimes he has a goatee and long hair – this is considered one of his many disguises. When he finally shows up on the mountainside with the short hair, she’s completely bowled over at who it is, even though all he really did was shave.)

Seriously, after this she talks to him when he has a fake goatee and some long hair on – they have an entire game of basketball together! – and when he shows up with the short hair she’s like, “OH MY GOD IT’S YOU.” She’s not the sharpest sandwich at the picnic.

Hrithik really impressed me in Jodhaa Akbar (which I swear I will talk about this week, I promise!), which was a Super Serious Drama that I straight-up enjoyed and thought was a quality film, so this was…a change. But he sells it the way any good movie star sells whatever movie they’re in, and his scenes are far and away better than any of the rest of that movie.

Fun fact: this movie has a kiss between Aishwarya and Hrithik (a Bollywood no-no), and it landed the movie in court under charges of indecency and being derogatory to women. Don’t know how that turned out; I do know that in Jodhaa Akbar there is a semi-kiss that seemed like a very intentionally choreographed “kiss my ass,” and I’m guessing this is where that came from.

I cannot recommend this movie, as it is so painfully cheeseball that it is largely unwatchable. It is, however, no worse than Octopussy. (What could be?) So if you are in the mood to laugh at an action movie and hum along to the occasional musical number, this might fit the bill.

I do know that, if anything DOES make this movie worth watching, cracking up at how much the camera loves Hrithik Roshan is that thing. It happens early, it happens often, and it happens to be hilarious.

Best part: I was thinking about writing this up, and I thought, “Well, it won’t be the same without a compilation of Hrithik Roshan walking in slow-motion towards the camera with his shirt unbuttoned and his scarf fluttering in the wind, but where the hell am I going to find that?”

Turns out someone made it, and put it to a love song. Thank you, internet. Thank you for everything.

My nonfiction piece “The High Untresspassed Sanctity of Space” is up at Lightspeed Magazine. It’s a slightly unorthodox profile of Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon.

I wanted to write a big post here about him/the space program, but I couldn’t even decide where to begin. Instead, these are the three photos from the research folder that, to me, say the most.

This now-famous image was shot during Cernan’s Apollo 17 mission. It’s a pole!

This is Cernan, preparing to climb back into the lunar module and rendezvous with the command module. The plaque on the support pole reads, Here Man completed his first explorations of the Moon. December 1972 AD. May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind. The ladder is still on the moon.

(I will never, never get over how flimsy and fragile this looks; tin foil and some little pipes, and flags taped on.)

And this one, to which I can add nothing.

Check out the article, if you’re so inclined; I know sincerity is weird, coming from me, but I think we’ll all be okay.

When I worked for the event planner, back in 1874, we did a lot of serious parties. Usually they were weddings, but there were a surprising number of dream birthdays as well. Those parties were generally a lot fancier than I could have imagined. (You think Gossip Girl is completely fake and impossible, but I assure you, I only ever looked at those parties and thought, “They’ve understaffed.” It’s all reaaaaal!)

I am not a huge party person, but those parties still seemed a little empty, because very few of them were based on movies. Specifically, the best party of all time:

I have thought for years and continue to think this is the best party idea of all time. (Except for the threats-from-violent-gangs part and the running-from-the-cops part and the 1/3-of-your-guests-will-perish-and/or-get-picked-up-by-the-cops part, but no party is perfect, and this is still better than some of the parties I’ve been to.)

The problem with that party is logistics. All of them.

It’s hard to ask people to haul ass as high as 100th St (where the movie’s first chase scenes were filmed), wander casually down to 72nd street, get into a fight with baseball bats, hang out in Union Square for several hours, then hop the train down to Coney Island at dawn (before anything is open). Even if you are actually planning a party and not being a hopeless smartass, there’s no reason to do this; it’s long and exhausting, and by the time you get to Coney, even if things were open at 7am, everyone’s too tired to hit the Wonder Wheel or anything.

I even tried to schedule this party once, before I realized it was impossible for anyone with a day job or a circadian rhythm or anything. And yet, every summer I get a brief, flickering urge to do it, because if done right, it would be the best party in the world, ever.

(This post brought to you by trying to think of ways to make my sister suffer in the name of my birthday. I was THISCLOSE to getting her to sit through the midnight show of Eclipse. SO CLOSE.)

This weekend, I saw Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time. It was exactly as good as people have said, which means it was a complete wreck.

The saddest thing is, even if you get over the whitewashed casting, and the nonsense plot, and the laborious action scenes (save the first big one during the city raid, which was genuinely exciting), there’s still nothing there. It’s all so calculated and flat and recycled.

The other saddest thing is watching this cast try to sell what they had to know was a total dog. Richard Coyle managed to do a lot in his three minutes of screen time, and Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton were trying SO HARD, but it was just never going to happen. I’d like to see them in something else. (Particularly in something else that is not the sequel to this movie. Ever.)

Thing I can’t find photo proof of but which is totally true: the Alamut CGI looks exactly like Mont-Saint-Michel.

Not sure why, but we’ll go with it! (This was said a lot during pre-production, I expect.)

Check out the whole thing over here.

The line between action movies and video games is getting thinner. In theory, this isn’t a bad thing; games have increasingly rich world-building and character development, and action movies are combining choreography and CGI to compete with the physically-impossible feats of their avatar muses.

In reality, when a game is made into a movie, it generally falls into the trap of attempting to recreate game play instead of bringing the world and the characters to life in a compelling or coherent narrative.

It’s easy to say that this issue is the big mistake that was made in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. However, that wouldn’t be doing justice to its actual missteps.

I’m just saying, you know a movie has been ambitious in its mistakes when its highlight is Alfred Molina giving a passionate kiss to an ostrich.

The first thing to know about Prince of Persia is that it opens with this subtitle: It Is Said Some Lives Are Linked Across Time…They Are Connected By An Ancient Calling…Destiny

…in Papyrus.

If anything is going to give you a sense of the care and thought put into this movie, this is it. Given that the filmmakers couldn’t be bothered to move past a default font for their word-salad introduction, it seems that much less surprising that its characters have the cognitive acumen of waffles, that the casting is casually racist, and that the plot feels like a psych experiment to see how long people will stay in their seats.

Adopted Persian prince Dastan helps his brothers invade the sacred city of Alamut, after some bad intel about Alamut having hidden weapons (get it?). During the celebrations, Dastan’s father is murdered and Dastan framed. He flees with Alamut’s princess Tamina, who’s only after the dagger in his pants, if you get my meaning. It’s a magical dagger that can turn back time, is my meaning.

Once out of danger, Dastan decides to immediately return to danger and restore his good name. (He’s not the sharpest bulb in the drawer.) Meanwhile, the search for weapons of one-at-a-time destruction begins in Alamut, as the power-hungry man who invented the weapons charge makes his bid for power (GET IT?).

The gymnastic Dastan (whose parkour stunts are the movie’s only interesting action moments) is played by miscast Jake Gyllenhaal, valiantly trying to eke what fun he can from a role that’s 25% stunts, 25% puppyish dolefulness, 25% labored banter, and 25% looking amazed. Tamina is miscast Gemma Arterton, whose role exists to delay big reveals by being as haranguing and ill-advised as possible. (Their bantering scenes are physically painful, both because she’s written so poorly and because Gyllenhaal’s only palpable romantic interest seems to be in his eldest brother, played by Richard Coyle.)

Black-market ostrich-lover Alfred Molina and scheming royal uncle Ben Kingsley (one of the few actors of color in the cast) spend the movie locked in a ham-off. This should be amazing (they’re both ham heavyweights) but instead gives you the same kind of vicarious embarrassment you feel when watching someone bomb at amateur improv night. And of course, it’s impossible not to point out that all this miscasting plays out in a sixth-century Persia populated almost entirely by white people. (Oh, and the helpful African knife-thrower who barely speaks; let’s not forget him. Diversity!)

The film is as meandering and ill-fitting as the bizarre casting suggests. For such a single-minded pair of people, Dastan and Tamina are pretty easily distracted, and end up with a remarkably long list of people to whom they explain the secret and holy purpose of the dagger in Jake’s pants. Still, it doesn’t seem to matter that our heroes aren’t bright, since they’re exceptionally lucky. This is the sort of movie where a dagger that turns back time for one minute is reached by everyone just before the fifty-nine-second mark.

The effect of all these little cinematic crimes piling up could have been a campy trainwreck, the sort of gonzo popcorn film that earns a place in posterity for being awesomely awful. Instead, the movie feels only deflated, a flat and lazy version of what it could have been; it’s a grindingly calculated attempt at entertainment, a series of missed opportunities by seasoned filmmakers and artists who could, at every turn, have done better.

I thought, for fleeting and hopeful moments, that maybe some of this movie’s failings could be traced to the game. Perhaps it’s the game that’s frightfully dull! For those who haven’t played Prince of Persia, it’s impossible to know whether in-game cobra attacks sound oddly like helicopters descending, or how many times you have to fight the same bosses before you can defeat them and level up. (Dastan faces the Hassansins about eight hundred times, so either he is exceptionally good at wounding-but-not-killing people, or the Hassansins are the give-uppingest bunch of assassins-for-hire we’ve seen in a while.)

Maybe this whole movie is a demonstration of how some things you can gloss over in play need to be thought about on film. Maybe this movie is just a two-hour example of why we should never go to a videogame movie ever again and just play Red Dead Redemption instead!

But that’s an easy out for a movie that doesn’t deserve one. Any movie adaptation’s measure lies in working as a piece of media without the aid of the source material. In a successful adaptation, the narrative would be a cohesive standalone and negate most game-to-screen translation issues.

This is not a successful adaptation.

Clumsily plotted, hamfistedly allegorical, miscast; everything about Prince of Persia is bad, and it’s so boring you don’t even care. [Obligatory joke about wishing the dagger had turned back time two hours so no one ever had to see this movie.]

Genevieve is just sorry that the inevitable Ben Kingsley/Alfred Molina ham-off had to happen this way.

[This piece originally appeared on Tor.com]