Arr!

Jul. 6th, 2003 12:57 pm
joiedecombat: (Default)
[personal profile] joiedecombat
Saw Sinbad last night. I want to be a pirate now. Arr!

It was a very good movie - a little like Treasure Planet, only better - and everyone should go see it. Done by the same folks that did The Road To El Dorado, and in much the same style. There's a maturity to it - or maybe it's a lack of juvenility - that puts it quite a bit above most Disney animated films. I'm not entirely sure about the recent trend of casting big live-action stars in voice-acting roles for animated films, but I dug the hell out of Brad Pitt as Sinbad. His voice-acting has a quality to it that I can't really remember having heard in an animated movie before. Very natural, a little deadpan. Joseph Fiennes was rowr-worthy, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Eris. Yay cool villain!

One particular aspect of the plot amused me, not because it was funny in itself, but because it illustrated to me how much my perspective has changed as I've gotten older.

There is a romantic triangle, what with Sinbad and his old childhood friend the noble prince and the prince's fiancee with a thing for the high seas. You can see this coming a mile and a half away.

In the past, when I watched movies with this kind of plot device, I was never happy unless the girl ended up with the hero of the movie. You know, the charming, not entirely reliable rogue who gets to have all the adventures and shit, instead of the prince at home who steadfastly does the right thing because he genuinely loves his country. Granted, in most cases the prince-at-home is kind of staid and boring, and the hero is lots more interesting - obviously, or he wouldn't be the hero.

This time... okay, I like Sinbad. He's hot, he's fun, he's got an appealing combination of fundamental heroism and inner shadiness and uncertainty. But.

Prince-guy, Proteus. (And why, exactly, they picked that name for him, I will never know.) Also hot. Known the girl for years, genuinely cares for her, determined, before the movie's even really got going, that he's not going to let political arrangements force her to marry him if she doesn't want to... Loves his country, does everything he can to protect it, does everything he can to do the right thing and nearly gets killed for it.

Gets ditched. And she doesn't even put up a fight when he tells her to go.

For the first time that I can remember, I left the movie thinking that, sure, she loved Sinbad, but she should have had one bout of wild monkey sex with him on the trip back, and then stayed in Syracuse and married the prince. Wench.

I'm getting old.

Anyhow, go see it. Yay pirates!
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