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Posted in: Kaitlyn Booth, Movies, Sony | Tagged: movies, Review, sony, uncharted
Uncharted Review: Another Video Game Movie Fails to Stick the Landing
Uncharted is far from the worst movie you will see this year. However, it is another video game adaptation that fails to adapt the interactive medium to an inactive medium without losing some of the magic that made the source material so good.
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Summary: Street-smart Nathan Drake is recruited by seasoned treasure hunter Victor "Sully" Sullivan to recover a fortune amassed by Ferdinand Magellan and lost 500 years ago by the House of Moncada.
The thing that tends to make adaptations fail right out of the gate is neglecting to take into consideration how people interact with the media. You don't watch a TV show like you read a book, and you don't watch a play the way you watch a movie. All of these experiences are incredibly different. When it comes to video game adaptations, there is the added hurdle of taking an interactive way of storytelling and making it inactive.
If Uncharted were a series that had one of the most unique stories ever, this series wouldn't have such a hard time making itself unique. However, these games have always had an incredibly generic story, which is not an insult to the games. The story being very "paint by numbers" allowed the developers to focus on making the gameplay, the graphics, the puzzles, all of the things that make a game a game the best they can possibly be. The story being pretty damn good with some memorable voice performances and set pieces are things that made this series so popular and why they greenlit a movie based on Uncharted in 2008.
However, you aren't doing anything but watching when you're watching a movie. You aren't figuring out the next puzzle, you aren't trying to figure out the next clue, you're just watching an actor do that, and the thing that made this series great is lost. What is left is the same treasure hunter story that we've seen a million times before. The story isn't bad, it's fine, but that's all it is, fine. It does nothing to elevate the genre it is attempting to launch a franchise into, but it also doesn't do anything to the detriment of the genre either; it merely exists.
If that is all someone wants out of an Uncharted movie, then there is a very good chance that there is plenty here to enjoy. Some of the puzzles are pretty neat; stars Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg have the kind of chemistry where you're not sure if these two guys are about to exchange friendship bracelets or strangle each other. It works more than it doesn't, and while some of the one-liners are a little cringy, it isn't anything bad enough to take you out of the movie by a long shot. Their arcs are just as generic as the rest of the story, but they do a fine job with them.
As previously stated, this movie has been in development since 2008, which means people born the year this movie came out are old enough to go see it in theaters. The script has been through rewrites and many different directors, but you wouldn't know that by watching Uncharted. There isn't anything here that feels particularly "modern" about this script. If it was the exact same one from 2008, no one would be surprised [even though we know it isn't because the original script was exceptionally far removed from the source material]. The most modern thing about this movie is how it seems to embrace its own source material. In 2008, nerd properties were still a little ashamed to be nerd properties, and today it is considered a mark of pride to be based on a game, comic, or something of the sort.
Those things tend to come in the directing and cinematography with a couple of first-person shots that will give you vertigo if you see this in IMAX, and the framing will make fans of the series fingers twitch as they try to make the quick time event work. The action scenes are very good, and it's clear to see why this movie quite literally almost killed its star. There is a clear setup for a franchise with a pre-credits and mid-credits scene, and it's clear that Sony wants to make more of these. However, they don't leave a bunch of dangling plot threads for the said sequel and wrap up this movie's story fairly well.
Uncharted took over a decade to make it to the big screen, and it's unclear whether or not it was worth the wait. The things that made the games great are the things that cannot translate to movies. That was always going to be the biggest challenge for this movie to overcome, and it might not have been able to do it no matter how hard they tried. Instead, we got another video game adaptation that fails to stick the landing, but at least this one isn't completely terrible.
Uncharted
6/10
Uncharted is far from the worst movie you will see this year. However, it is another video game adaptation that fails to adapt the interactive medium to an inactive medium without losing some of the magic that made the source material so good.
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