What’s Up with Video Game Movies? (with Full Uncharted Review)

Last night I finally got around to seeing Uncharted, making it just the third movie I’ve seen in 2022. Before the movie was announced, I had never played an Uncharted game before (mostly because I’ve only ever owned an Xbox), but a friend let me play through Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End before I saw the movie. The game itself is fantastic. It has a great story, score, characters, and even captivating cinematography in both cut-scenes and gameplay. Based on the track record of other video game movies, combined with the fact that they cast young for this adaptation, I wasn’t expecting much. I walked out of that theater not only pleasantly surprised, but actually hoping for a sequel. So I’ll kick it off with my review of the movie, and then we can talk about why it succeeded where others failed. (To skip Uncharted spoiler review, click here).

Jack’s Score – 86/100 | Rotten Tomatoes – 41% | Audience – 90% | IMDb – 6.7/10

So, “succeeded” might have been a slightly liberal term to use. The movie had a budget of $120 million, grossed $44 million its opening weekend, and is currently sitting at $115 million domestic, $302 million worldwide, per Box Office Mojo. That’s not quite a flop, but it’s nothing to write home about. It also scored a 41% on Rotten Tomatoes, as listed above. However, I don’t put much stock into critic reviews, especially on RT. They just never have too much to actually critique and never cite anything specific, which makes them come across as rants, but that’s a tangent for a different article. I enjoyed it, it seems like the average person enjoyed it, and that’s enough success for me.

Now, I will say I am glad that I played through Uncharted 4, because the movie clearly based its plot loosely on the game. Now when I say loosely, I mean it. The only real similarities were that the hidden treasure was a ship full of gold and they used crosses as a key to the puzzle. The antagonists were different but they bore a passing resemblance in motivation and design to Rafe Adler and Nadine Ross from the game. Otherwise, no pirates, no lost city, the movie was it’s own thing, and I can appreciate that. If you’re planning on starting a franchise with this movie, its best to tell a new story that people don’t need to play the game to understand.

Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg gave solid performances and played off each other nicely. They had much better chemistry than expected, and while not all of the quips landed, their back-and-forth was fun and entertaining. Tom Holland was able to balance the suave confidence of a experienced street thief and the naiveite of a young adventurer that made me really love the movie. I didn’t understand the decision to cast young for this movie, as there were plenty of great options for Nathan Drake, such as popular fan cast Nathan Fillion, but Tom Holland’s interpretation of the character was fantastic, and he’s the kind of actor capable of carrying the Uncharted franchise forward for multiple years.

While the plot was a pretty standard adventure story that wasn’t anything groundbreaking, two aspects of the film that really stood out to me were the cinematography and the score. Ruben Fleischer definitely had a lot of fun with this movie, with a lot of the shots mimicking the transition and shot styles of the video game. The score was also excellent. Ramin Djawadi delivered an excellent moment of swelling triumph with The Biggest Treasure Never Found, the track that plays as Drake finally finds Magellan’s ships, and the rest of his score permeated the story in the best way.

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In the end, while it wasn’t anything special, I thoroughly enjoyed Uncharted, and I think it did what it was intended to do, which was get me to play the game. The real problem with video game movies is that they need to adapt 20, 60, sometimes 120 hours (*cough cough* Assassin’s Creed Odyssey/Valhalla) of playthrough into a two hour movie – a problem often compounded when studios try to adapt an entire franchise into one movie. It only took me 17 hours to play through Uncharted 4, but it of course felt like a much fuller story.

Take a movie like Assassin’s Creed, based on a game franchise who’s playthrough times range from 10 to 130 hours, so trying to condense even one game into a movie is going to be hard enough. The movie’s real downfall came when it decided to focus on the lesser B-story of the game franchise – the modern day conflict with Abstergo, a front for the enemy of the Assassin’s Brotherhood, the Templars. Pulling the audience from the action-adventure story of following an Assassin around southern Spain for a sci-fi thriller about a tech company with muted sets is going to turn people off of the movie.

Another major problem is the idea of the open-world exploring that many games have an open-world feature external of the overarching plot that make the player feel more involved in the story. The Assassin’s Creed and Tomb Raider franchise are great examples of this. While there is always a through-line for the player to follow to advance the game, he or she can run around the surrounding environment and explore until content. This is a huge part of the video game experience that is lost when it is adapted to film, and unfortunately there isn’t much studios can do to correct it.

Other games like Injustice: Gods Among Us and Mortal Kombat have a different problem. These games don’t have open-world exploration, but rather a tight story that the player follows through a set of one-on-one fights, intercut with longer cut scenes telling the story. These games shouldn’t have too much of a problem being adapted to the silver screen, but still struggle because their adaptations are unfaithful to the source material. DC’s animated Injustice: God’s Among Us is a very liberal take on the story, which threw me when I watched it. The story could have been adapted very directly while throwing in the prequel comics for added runtime and additional context. Instead, the movie picks and chooses select bits from the game and wraps the whole thing up in just over an hour, leaving no potential for a sequel based on the 2017 sequel to the original game.

The best performing video game movies that I could find were Pokémon Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog, which recorded Rotten Tomatoes scores of 68% and 63% respectively. Their success might come from the use of their cute titular characters paired with the voices of comedically strong actors, but they also tell a new story. The common person doesn’t associate Pikachu with the detective persona from a spin-off game. Similarly, Sonic’s story takes place on Earth as a begrudging bromance road trip movie, instead of the planet his adventures normally take place on. These stories spend a lot of time developing the characters instead of jamming entire games down our throat as fast as possible. Because of this focus on the characters and their relationships, it’s easy to come away from these movies feeling a lack in plot. There is still some sort of sweet spot that these movies can’t seem to strike. Let’s just be grateful that the studio redesigned Sonic after initial backlash.

Some fans think that with no way to fix these issues these issues, movies simply shouldn’t be adapted from video games. Truly, video game I.P.’s are used to sell tickets. Uncharted would have worked as it’s own action-adventure movie, but tagging the name “Uncharted” to it helps to boost sales, as well as get the movie made in the first place. Studios and producers are much more comfortable signing off on an established I.P. than on a brand new story, unfamiliar to audiences. Maybe we will continue to get video game movies and just have to hope studios figure it out, or maybe these movies should be told as new stories, free from the strings and baggage of the source material.

Find me on Twitter @JackTalksMovies and let me know your take.

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