The Uncharted movie is about to be released, starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg.
Now, I’m going to withhold judgement until the movie is released,
but let’s just say that adapting video games into movies is always hard.
And Uncharted is one of the most popular and beloved game series of all time,
so it was never going to be easy to adapt it in a way that would satisfy everyone.
And right from the start, this movie seemed destined not to please the fans.
Right from the moment Tom Holland was cast in the lead role instead of Nathan Fillion.
Then the first trailer dropped and it seemed to just reinforce
a lot of the concerns fans had about the direction that this adaptation was taking.
The second trailer was a bit better but moustache or not, I just cannot see Mark Wahlberg as Sully.
See, the Uncharted games have always had this cinematic quality too them so adapting scenes
like this to film was not going to be the hard part of making an Uncharted movie.
No, the heart of the games is the characters, which means the key to a successful adaptation
is getting the casting right. Tom Holland is fine as a young Drake,
but going off the trailers there is nothing about how Wahlberg seems to be portraying the character
of Sully that is at all in line with Richard McGonagle’s iconic performance in the games.
But like I said at the start, I’ll hold off judgment until I see the film.
I don’t like writing movies off before seeing them, and will judge anything on its merits.
But personally, I will be going into the movie expecting to see an over the top, swashbuckling
adventure story that only has some surface level similarities to the Uncharted game franchise.
Basically, I am expecting it to be a fun action movie, but not an Uncharted movie.
But that’s OK, because we actually already have a really good Uncharted movie.
It’s called The Adventures of Tintin, and was directed by none other than Steven Spielberg.
A director that knows a thing or two about adventure movies.
Now, putting to one side the fact that this is of course an adaptation
of the Tintin comics, not the Uncharted games, I want to take a step back and describe the movie,
and then you tell me if it sounds like Uncharted. A plucky young adventurer comes across an artefact
that contains the secret location to an ancient hoard of buried treasure.
A sinister villain also has eyes on the treasure, and is prepared to use force to get it.
The adventurer is abducted and taken prisoner, and needs to use his ingenuity and stealth to escape.
He joins forces with an older, gruff and rugged sailor whose cynicism balances out
the young adventurer’s optimism. After a brawl and a gunfight,
the heroes manage to escape from a cargo vessel. They journey to their next destination in an
old plane, but it crash lands in the desert, leaving the heroes stranded.
More information comes to light about the treasure and its pirate origins,
as we establish a family connection to it for both the heroes and the villains.
They learn that only by uniting three ancient scrolls can the location of the treasure be found.
The heroes move in to foil the villain, but are unsuccessful.
A final confrontation takes place that sees the villain defeated and the heroes, thinking
they are about to be united with the treasure, instead only find another clue that promises
to lead them on to another adventure. All you need to do is take away some
of the classic Tintin characters like Thomson and Thompson and Snowy the dog,
tone down some of the movie’s more cartoonish flourishes,
and you have the makings of a brilliant Uncharted story right there.
All it’s really missing is a character like Elena Fischer.
But besides that, the Adventures of Tintin has everything you
could want out of an Uncharted movie. A globetrotting and swashbuckling adventure
about solving clues from ancient artefacts to find the location of a long-lost treasure.
The hero uses both his intellect and brawn to overcome challenges,
but more often than not his escapes are just matters of luck rather than skill.
Seriously, if I was going to make an Uncharted movie,
this is the movie I would have used as a template. Sure, Tintin is far more optimistic,
naïve and less sarcastic than Nathan Drake, and Captain Haddock is much less resourceful
and more of an alcoholic than Sully is. But frankly their personalities seem closer than
Wahlberg and Holland do to the game characters. And there is one scene in particular that
I want to talk about, and if you’ve seen Titntin then I think you know what it is.
Because even if you don’t agree with me that Tintin is an Uncharted movie,
the scene where Tintin, Haddock and Snowy are pursuing Red Rackham through the streets
of Morocco is 100 percent Uncharted. I mean compare this scene to the car
chase scene in Uncharted 4 possibly one of the best
video games levels of all time. The two scenes have the same frantic
energy as the heroes and villains race down a hill through a town,
but in the movie, like the game, the camera smoothly follows the action from afar.
The core two and a half minutes of the Tintin sequence plays out in one single shot.
Not only does this make the action easier to follow, but it also
replicates the feeling of playing a video game, with the camera keeping everything in frame and
observing the action as neutrally as possible Of course, Tintin being an animated movie gave
Steven Spielberg the luxury of being able to have the camera do impossible things like this.
But live action movies like 1917, Kingsmen,
Children of Men, hell even No Time To Die
have all shown that it is possible to do major action set pieces in single takes.
In fact, I wouldn’t at all be surprised if the Uncharted movie has a scene like this.
Director Ruben Fleischer did a two and half minute long take action scene in Zombieland Double Tap,
that plays out very much like the brawl at the start of Uncharted 3.
But it’s not just the fact that this scene is shot in a single take that
makes it feel like the Uncharted game. It’s the entire way it is constructed.
In my Mandalorian video I talked about the concept of reversals in action storytelling.
This is how both Uncharted and Tintin make their action scenes so compelling,
by constantly shifting the advantage between the heroes and the villains,
and never letting one side have the upper hand for too long before it’s
snatched away from them again. In the movie and the game,
the vehicles give the scene speed and energy, while the characters leaping between them and
fighting in close quarters gives the scene physicality and danger.
This scene in Tintin has just the right level of over the top you’d expect from
Uncharted with a zipline, a collapsing building,
and plenty of explosions and guns. Plus, the entire aesthetic of the
Moroccan town is a textbook Uncharted setting. You could lift this scene completely unchanged,
place it in an Uncharted game and it would be awesome.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Tintin came out in the same year as Uncharted 3.
I think that the first two games were references for the filmmakers,
in the same way that the character of Tintin was a reference for Nathan Drake,
along with Steven Spielberg’s own Indiana Jones. So yeah, that’s kind of all I have to say.
I’m sorry this isn’t a very long video, or even a particularly insightful one.
It was just something I wanted to get off my chest before Uncharted came out because
I rewatched Tintin recently and it’s just so, so much fun and even though it’s been ten years
I’m still holding out hope for a sequel. But yeah, in conclusion, I am expecting
the Uncharted movie to be fun, but am not expecting it to feel like the Uncharted games.
But that’s OK, because if you want a movie that feels like the Uncharted games then you already
have one, in the Adventures of Tintin. Thank you for watching.
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