Uncharted - Review Thread

Uncharted(6/3/2022)
They’ve been trying to make a movie out of the “Uncharted” series of videogames pretty much since the games first started to come out and we’ve been hearing rumors about the development of this film for ages with various different casts and crews coming in and out of the development. The games, which are kind of like modernized riffs on Indiana Jones style archeological adventures, on some levels it makes a lot of sense for cinematic adaptation given that the games already kind of play out like movies but for the same reason they also kind of don’t make sense as sources of adaptation. This isn’t like Mortal Kombat or something where it takes actual creativity to form a linear narrative out of a games lore, it’s more like they just took the kind of thrills and banter the games were already known for and then cut them down to two hours and don’t let the player control things. There are some advantages to this: the film format does allow them to tell one of these stories without having to shoehorn in a bunch of gun violence for gameplay purposes but for the most part this movie kind of feels not unlike what it’s probably like to watch a string of cut scenes from the games cut together, which would be more of an insult if the original games weren’t actually pretty watchable and cinematic.

However, there are problems here that don’t have a lot to do with the adaptation. For one, Tom Holland and Mark Whalberg are both notably younger than their counterpart characters in the games, which can be a little jarring. In theory that means that these are prequels to what we saw in the games but the writers don’t really craft a terribly compelling origin story beyond what we already saw in flashbacks from the games. Also, while I think we all expect the history and archeology from Indiana Jones derived stories are not expected to be too authentic, this film’s story of chasing after a bunch of gold that Ferdinand Magellan supposedly hid somewhere is just insultingly stupid. Any schoolchild knows that when set sail to circumnavigate the world Magellan was after the same thing Columbus was after: spices from the East Indies. He would have had the means or economic motive to collect a bunch of gold from some unstated source when he stood to make a killing flooding the markets in Spain with cloves and cinnamon.

So that’s pretty dumb, but that aside I do think I’m a little more forgiving of this movie (which currently sits at 40% on Rotten Tomatoes) than some people are in large part because there are a couple of over the top action set pieces here that kind of won me over, at least in the casual “at home” viewing environment I watched it in. There’s the sequence heavily featured in the film’s advertising which has Nathan Drake dangling from cargo that’s dangling from a plane mid-flight and then there’s also this climactic action sequence involving ships being lifted by helicopters that I thought was a lot of fun and ended the movie on a fairly positive note. At the very least it’s plainly the best movie that director Ruben Fleischer has given us for whatever that’s worth and I do think that Holland could grow into this role and I’d probably be at least somewhat interested in seeing a sequel if they make one.
*** out of Five