PERSPECTIVE
Shoot first, ask questions later
There’s a moment in the Uncharted movie (perfect post-lunch viewing for the Christmas holidays) when Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) climbs down into a secret cubby-hole aboard an old ship full of gold that is being flown around by a helicopter and has just been boarded by numerous guntoting enemies. He says to his unreliable partner Sully (Mark Wahlberg): “You could stay up here and get shot in the head or come down here for a quick cuddle: up to you.” They only recently spent ten hours hiding in a car boot together, but Sully reluctantly joins him and they elude the bad guys.
It’s a telling as well as funny moment because it’s so anti-videogamey. In a videogame, being aboard an old ship full of gold that is being flown around by a helicopter and has just been boarded by numerous gun-toting enemies would be exactly the sort of situation in which you would expect to go on a climactic, cathartic rampage of assault-weapon murder. But this Drake gets out of scrapes by hiding or running away rather than shooting everyone in the eyeball or amygdala. Later, he puts on the iconic shoulder holster for the first time over his grubby grandad-collar white top, but he does not fire a single bullet until one hour and 37 minutes of the movie have passed – and he doesn’t win that fight by shooting anyway. This must be what one highbrow magazine critic, in a sniffy review of the movie, called “failing to replicate the joys of its source material”. But if I wanted to replicate the joys of playing an Indiana Jonesinspired murder simulator, I would just play the games again.
This Drake gets out of scrapes by hiding or running away rather than shooting everyone in the eyeball or amygdala
Instead, what movie Nathan Drake really leans into from the source material is the character’s uncanny ability at climbing and running around. This is justified vaguely by an early sequence of Tom Holland shimming up ropes as a workout in the palatial New York penthouse apartment that he somehow lives in even though he works as a bartender. Near the end, he decides to jump up and grab the mouth of a cannon to haul himself up the side of a ship, even though there is a lower rung of a perfectly serviceable wooden ladder right next to it.
All this is also a subtle nod to the games that the Uncharted series itself shamelessly imitated; you know, the ones with Lara Croft. The mechanics of the film’s treasure hunt – sigils carved into stone, crucifixes used as keys to unlock centuries-old hidden doors – are classic Tomb Raider puzzle styles. Just as in Tomb Raider, too, no one ever wonders aloud what exactly is the hidden energy source that allows the simple pull of a lever to activate a giant, rumbling, iron-and-stone mechanism. Surely a spr
