Sheesh, why do so many fictional uncles have to be so evil? It's guys like this that make me feel bad for all the great real-life uncles out there that may get a bad rep because of how often the concept is used.
I’m back with another formality proposal for a character who’s in the category, but not officially approved. Once again, I’m also kind of surprised no one else has tried to approve them yet seeing as how the work in question isn’t super well-remembered, but it’s definitely not obscure either, and this character reveals himself to be quite a nasty piece of work. It’s fine though; I appreciate any chance given to both polish my writing skills and help the wiki sort characters where they belong, so if anything, I like that there are still some notable characters who deserve to be in the category and require a proposal and official consensus. With that established, time to get to work.
On a side note, due to changing my username since posting this, for some weird reason, you can't see the votes anymore. If you want to see them, and by extension, the proof that this was approved, follow the redirect here.
What’s the work?[]
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a movie from 2010 that acts as a loosely-based adaptation of a video game by the same name, and being released by Walt Disney Pictures and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, it shares a number of similarities in format with the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. In this adaptation, Dastan, a man who was adopted by King Sharaman into his family when he displayed an impressive act of courage as a boy, assists his brother in attacking the holy city of Alamut, due to the king’s brother, Nizam, relaying evidence that they’ve committed treachery by selling weapons to their enemies. Shortly after playing a crucial role in their victory, however, King Sharaman comes to visit them due to not believing Alamut is guilty of what they’re being accused of, and is fatally burned to death when he is given a poisoned robe as a gift from Dastan, incriminating him as his murderer and forcing him to flee with Tamina, the city’s princess. He soon discovers that whoever was behind his adopted father’s death and the attack on the city is after a sacred dagger that he came into possession of that allows the wielder to go back in time, and in addition to clearing his name, he must do everything possible to keep it out of the wrong hands. Unfortunately, those “wrong hands” turn out to belong to one of the people he trusts the most and least expected to be behind such a heinous betrayal.
Who is he and what does he do?[]
Nizam is King Sharaman’s brother and right-hand advisor, the uncle of his sons, Tus and Garsiv, and the adoptive uncle of Dastan. While he initially comes across as one of the most calm and reasonable characters in the film, as well as loving, caring and trustworthy towards his family, he is actually the hidden main antagonist of the film who’s responsible for nearly all the bad things that transpire. First, he hired a spy to convince the Persians that Alamut was smuggling weapons for their enemies, which it turns out was really a setup so that they would invade the city, which would then allow him to get close to the sacred dagger, which he wants to get his hands on. Dastan initially trusts him enough to consider him the only person he can go to and confide in, so he sets up a private meeting with him after going on the run to explain his theory that his brother Tus was responsible for his father’ death, and by framing him for it, he’s removing all potential obstacles to becoming king. However, he soon discovers that Nizam was the real perpetrator when he noticed that his hands are burnt. Nizam insists that they got burned when he tried to pull the poisoned robe off his father, but Dastan remembers for a fact he never touched him in the aftermath, leading him to conclude that it must have been from handling it beforehand.
After subsequently getting away from Garsiv, who is still completely convinced that he killed their father, along with his men, Dastan tries to piece together why Nizam would do all of this after getting past the initial shock of the revelation. He then gets Tamina to disclose the full truth to him, during which she reveals that there is a giant sandglass in the caverns beneath Alamut where the Sands of Time are being kept; while the dagger can only carry enough of the sand to turn back time by about a minute when you push the hilt, if you insert it into the sandglass, you can turn back time indefinitely. Dastan then realizes, to his horror, that this is what Nizam is after, and that he secretly resented both his brother and his nephews all along for making it impossible for him to be king. Therefore, he intends to use the dagger on the sandglass to turn time back to when he saved his brother from a lion (which Dastan frequently heard about from his adoptive father since he was so fond of it), correct what he considers his biggest mistake, and rewrite the timeline so that Sharaman died when he was young and his brothers were never born, which will allow him to take the throne for himself And that’s not even the worst of it; according to Tamina, it’s forbidden to use the Sands of Time that’s stored in the sandglass that way, so trying to do so would invoke the wrath of the gods who spared humanity and stored it there in the first place, to the extent it could destroy the whole world.
Realizing the magnitude of the situation, Dastan and Tamina resolve to take the dagger to a sanctuary where she can seal the dagger into the stone it came from. Meanwhile, Nizam lies to Tus that Dastan tried to murder him and tries to convince him to have Dastan killed discreetly without a public trial. However, Tus refuses and decides Dastan should be brought to justice the proper way. Therefore, Nizam hires the Hassansins, a ruthless group of mercenaries that his brother previously tried to dismiss and disband, to kill Dastan and take the dagger back. While Dastan and Tamina survive their assault, they still manage to take the dagger from them and kill Garsiv and his men in the process, whom Dastan had just convinced of his innocence. In the aftermath, Dastan and Tamina convince Sheik Amar and his group of merchant-bandits to help them get the dagger back because of what’s at stake.
After arriving back at Alamut, Sheik’s right-hand man Seso sacrifices himself to get the dagger back for them, after which Dastan confronts Tus and tries to convince him of Nizam’s plot. Just after showing him the power of the dagger and proving his innocence, however, Nizam arrives and upon seeing what’s happened, promptly kills Tus by slashing his throat, takes the dagger back again and leaves Dastan at the mercy of a member of the Hassansins. Before leaving, he mocks Tus for being “so eager for the throne”, Dastan for “always charging in, so eager to prove he’s more than something the king scraped off the streets”, and collectively for the “bond between brothers no longer being the sword that defends our empire”, like King Sharaman said shortly before his death. With some help from Tamina, however, Dastan manages to kill the mercenary and the two give chase to Nizam through the secret tunnels beneath Alamut.
Confronting him where the sandglass is located, Dastan expresses his disgust at how he killed his own family just to become king, to which Nizam simply replies his brother was also his curse, and even when both Dastan and Tamina practically beg him to not use the dagger on the sandglass for what it’ll unleash on the world, he just laughs it off and tries to throw them off the cliff. Tamina then sacrifices herself by letting herself fall so that Dastan can pull himself up and stop him. Meanwhile, Nizam succeeds in stabbing the sandglass and starts to turn back time while simultaneously bringing about a massive sandstorm sent by the gods as punishment for this. Thankfully though, Dastan then gets into a struggle over the dagger immediately afterwards and manages to pull it out again, which reverses time all the way back to when he first took it from a royal guard when they invaded the city.
Now armed with the knowledge of what Nizam intends to do and the horrific chain of events that will occur, Dastan publicly reveals his treachery to his brothers and the other Persians by revealing there are, in fact, no weapon forges to be found in Alamut and that the spy who recovered the weapons was hired by none other than Nizam to implicate them. While Nizam initially tries to play it cool, once Dastan recites to Tus what their father said about how “a true king seeks the advice of counsel, but always listens to his heart”, he takes Dastan’s advice and decides to find the spy and make him tell the truth. With his scheme set to be discovered, Nizam breaks down and subsequently tries to attack and kill Dastan, but Dastan subdues him and remarks in disgust how he already had everything that really mattered, but it still wasn’t enough for him. He then leaves him to face justice, but Nizam uses the opportunity to make one more underhanded attempt to kill him by stabbing him from behind with a concealed knife, but Tus fatally stabs him before he can, killing him once and for all.
Mitigating Factors[]
As he reveals his true colors over the course of the film, it gradually becomes abundantly clear that Nizam stuffed any good or honorable traits he may have had a long time ago into a lockbox and melted the key. He may have saved his brother’s life when they were young, but he now considers it his biggest mistake, his brother himself as a curse, and goes to extreme measures to undo it just because he became king and the existence of his sons made it impossible for him to ever take the throne. As for Dastan, despite faking love and affection for him for so long and so convincingly that Dastan initially thought he was the only person he could trust to help clear his name and least suspected of treachery, once Dastan discovers his treachery and there’s no longer any need for pretenses, Nizam reveals he’s actually always held him in utter contempt. Dastan may have never had a claim to the throne due to not being related by blood, but he nonetheless always saw him as “trash” that belonged in the gutter and never understood why his brother generously took him in.
To sum it up, he may have been a fantastic actor and was possibly an altogether decent person a while back, but ultimately, Nizam shows himself to be nothing more than a spiteful, power-hungry and envious psychopath who has no true loyalty to anyone but himself. The worst part is he doesn’t even have the potential excuse of being mistreated by his family to have turned out this way; we’re given every indication that his brother, his nephews and Dastan all genuinely loved, respected and trusted him… it was all just because he couldn’t accept not being king and gradually felt more and more entitled to it. Dastan’s final words to him are pretty much spot-on; “you had everything any man could ever dream of; love, respect and family. But that wasn’t enough for you, was it?”
Heinousness[]
Being the orchestrator and catalyst of nearly all the bad things that happen in the movie, he sets the in-story standard, and boy howdy, does he ever blow past the general standard. His actions towards his family are horrible enough on their own; namely, arranging for his brother to be horribly burned to death by a poisoned robe, framing Dastan for it, taking every subsequent opportunity to further incriminate and have him killed, having Garsiv killed by the Hassansins, and even killing Tus himself once he had the chance, all in addition to “correcting the mistake” of saving his brother’s life and erasing Tus and Garsiv from existence. However, then you remember in retrospect that he also framed an innocent city and brought a completely unprovoked attack down on their heads, which led to a decent amount of destruction and innocent deaths that couldn’t be reversed by Dastan’s reset since he could only go back as far as when he first came in possession of the dagger after the attack was carried out.
And of course, he still manages to trump all of that in the climax where, even when faced with the likely possibility of causing a worldwide cataclysm should he use the dagger for his intended purpose, he didn’t care one iota, pretty much laughed it off and proceeded as normal. So just in case you still had any hope that he was at least ignorant about that, the movie makes sure there’s not a shadow of a doubt left about his true character; an extraordinarily selfish and callous monster who’s willing to risk letting the whole world be punished and destroyed for his actions if it means getting what he wants.
Final Verdict[]
He seems like a pretty open-and-shut case to me, but it’s up to you. Thanks for reading!