Desert Warrior

Desert Warrior (2025) is set “1500 years ago” in Arabia, “where tribes fight over territory and water.” And where everybody speaks English. I can only imagine how much more fighting there would have been if each tribe had its own language or dialect. According to the opening intertitles, “In a bid to take control[,] Emperor Kisra II of the Sassanid Empire demands all tribal Kings [sic] turn over their daughters as concubines. Those [sic] that refuse are hunted into harsh desert where only the strongest survive.” The strongest and the computer-generated. I’d wonder how that counterintuitive recipe for disaster could possibly help Khosrow (oops, I meant “Kisra”) consolidate his power, but it sounds like he already has plenty of it, if he truly is able to issue and enforce such a decree. It also sounds like a bunch of taurus cacas — a variation of the equally spurious droit du seigneur stuff from Braveheart. There must be several documented causes of conflict endemic to that time and place; the film itself mentions two that are very plausible: water and land. Why make something up wherein the conflict boils down to the heroes and villains fighting over a girl? And the answer is, because it’s a convenient narrative shorthand that stands for three things. First, it lets us know that Kisra is a power-hungry tyrant — which Ben Kingsley’s can-I-have-my-money-now cameo isn’t enough to establish. Second, it reveals that Hanzala (Anthoy Mackey) may lust after gold but is also a Thief with a Heart of Gold when he protects Princess Hind (Aiysha Hart). And last but not least, #MeToo. Kisra II gets to be — retroactively and, I suspect, undeservedly — a patron devil of dirty old men because he had more than one wife at a time and God forbid we fail to project modern sensibilities onto ancient history regardless of what was customary back then. What Desert Warrior lacks in the way of a sense of time, it makes up for with a sense of place, at least during the first half of the movie. The desert looks as harsh as advertised, and the action sequences feel of a piece with the environment. It’s as though the filmmakers disregarded the past fifty years in order to deliver as historically inaccurate yet authentic looking an experience as the epics of old. Those were my thoughts until they showed us a “panoramic” view of Ctesiphon, the historical capital of Iranian empires. I know seventh-century Ctesiphon is not a place you can send the second unit to get some establishing shots; nevertheless, they could have recreated it like Olivier recreated London in the opening of Henry V. If the “exterior” looks like something out of 300, the interiors, specifically Kisra’s court/arena, look like something out of Caligula. Oddly, Kingsley gives a sedate performance when he should be hamming it up Malcolm McDowell style. There are several other shots and scenes that we may generously call “composites” throughout the film — mainly landscapes, armies, and a herd of war elephants that made me yearn for the documentary-like realism of Babar — none of which holds a candle to the movie’s primary aesthetic. Desert Warrior ends with a caption informing us that Kisra II was “poisoned by an unknown assassin. There are those who believe it was a concubine.” Is that so? Who exactly believes that? Well, you know, “those.”