Uncharted
Sony
Well, I am almost convinced that the Uncharted movie is actually happening. I’m up to about 95% after this trailer, which is our first real look at the prequel film starring Tom Holland as Nathan Drake.
The Uncharted movie has been stuck in development hell for about a decade, has gone through more directors than I can count, and it’s been so long that Mark Wahlberg has gone from being attached as Nathan Drake at the start to now playing Sully in the final version here, mentoring a younger Nathan in the form of Holland.
The new trailer shows off an adventure tale where Sully recruits Nathan (working as a…bartender?) to find some lost treasure, which is somehow connected to his missing brother Sam, whom we met as a main character (well into the future) in Uncharted 4.
I feel like if you didn’t know anything about Uncharted as a franchise, this would look mainly like any other generic “lost treasure” adventure story, so I am curious just how big the Uncharted fanbase might be to make this a success. Or the Tom Holland fanbase, I suppose.
In the trailer, we get a lot of Sophia Ali as Chloe. It’s funny, because she’s a friend of Sully’s, and at least comes off like she’s closer in age to Wahlberg than Holland, and yet, she was born in 1995. Holland was born in 1996, but simply looks younger. So they’re the same age, more or less. But she doesn’t seem to be getting positioned as a love interest for him. Elena is not in this story at all, as they shouldn’t even meet until later in the Uncharted canon. Not that I even really understand if this story is supposed to be canon.
One newcomer I found noteworthy is Tati Gabrielle playing someone simply called “Braddock.” I know her from The 100 on the CW, but she just had a big breakout part in the #1 show on Netflix, season 3 of You, so her star is clearly rising.
Uncharted
Sony
As for how this compares to the games, I mean, they couldn’t even make Mark Wahlberg grow a mustache for this? Come on. It makes him look more like Nathan than Tom this way. Otherwise, the sequence of the boxes falling out of the plane certainly seems like something out of the games (did we do exactly that scene at one point?). I certainly like Tom Holland, but given that our vision of Nathan Drake is always our Nolan North-voiced adult picture, outside of a few flashbacks, it’s a little hard to connect him to the game character.
I will certainly give it a chance, but this remains sort of a weird idea that I’m not sure will pan out, like most video game movies. But we’ll see how it goes.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and its audiobook, and The Earthborn Trilogy, also on audiobook.