Hacker Cinema
Uncharted
2022 · Film · 116 min
Directed by Ruben Fleischer
A young street-smart, Nathan Drake and his wisecracking partner Victor “Sully” Sullivan embark on a dangerous pursuit of “the greatest treasure never found” while also tracking clues that may lead to Nathan’s long-lost brother.
6 negative1 mixed6 neutralfrom 13 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
14 comments on Hacker News
I Hope it turns out well.
Generally I think Amazon does a good job with the prime original series.
I liked the Expanse. The peripheral was interesting. Even the LotR “rings of power” I found enjoyable, and maybe better than expected after those hobit movies.. Not perfect but it had heart, some humor, good music (Bear Mccready, Fiona apple!) thought a bit too sentimental as LOTR tends to be..
HBO took the “last of us” and did something decent I fall into hope springs eternal camp. But I’d rather play the story than just watch it… I loved the uncharted games, but am never going to see an uncharted movie.
In this case I watched my partner play fallout. It had a story, but you play you, not a specific character. But a settlement always needs your help.
20 years is a bad comparison point for "did Disney kill Indiana Jones." Disney bought Lucas just over 11 years ago. So what was the shape of the franchise at that point?
After a well-received film in 1989 and a well-received but niche Fate of Atlantis video game in 1992, and a TV series for a year or so (so not a smashing success, though I remember people liking it) in 1992-1993) it went dark movies/TV-wise, and none of the followup video games amounted to too much.
So the franchise wasn't in great shape or popular relevance pre-Crystal Skull, and that film certainly didn't help. It was largely disliked by audiences, and Dial of Destiny actually seems better received by audiences so far. Personally I thought it was a far better film, though not a "must see" - but how much blood is in that stone to squeeze out with an aging Harrison Ford compared to, say, Uncharted?
Anyone blaming Disney for the state of Lucasfilm franchises seems to have a huge chunk of selective memory for the 2000s. (E.g. for me, I stopped paying attention to a lot of new Star Wars media for a while after Vector Prime in 1999 and the resulting story arc.)
I am Vietnamese, some context followed.
The map looks indeed ridiculous. And I don't know if the movie was trying to appeal to China, or whether it was actually some misguided sarcasm, but the whole dashed-line isn't just some small controversy. It is a big deal, if not the deal for the whole area. Just last year, Uncharted (another AAA movie I believed) was also banned by both Vietnam and Philippines.
At this point, if your movie is banned due to this issue, I don't think it was accidental anymore. This is the third hundred-million dollars movie that was banned for this reason just in the past few years.
I have no opinion on whether movie should try to avoid the issue itself, but I do think it's justifiable and non-surprising (ie. it's good) that the government bans the movie. Geopolitics is both hard and weird, and being consistent is good.
The Last of Us being successful makes sense. It, like Naughty Dog's other big game Uncharted, was basically already a traditional movie-style story with interactive parts.
Uncharted is actually the best example of this. Its gameplay is super simplistic when you break it down, but it has a photorealistic dynamic cutscene layered on top which makes it fun.
> I've been trying to avoid sequels, reboots, and other Millennial nostalgia-based movies going to a mainstream theater, and I found it nearly impossible. Accidentally watched Uncharted not realizing it was based on... a video game of all things. It wasn't good. Nothing else was good either the past 2 years.
Same, but for a different reason: I saw too much of how the "sausage gets made", and watching an artistically shitty Marvel blockbuster just doesn't provide enough entertainment to "zone out" of the human suffering that goes into producing that stuff.
>it was based on... a video game of all things
And the Uncharted games are great. They have good characterization, good writing and funny comedy bits. None of these were present in the movie.
I've been trying to avoid sequels, reboots, and other Millennial nostalgia-based movies going to a mainstream theater, and I found it nearly impossible. Accidentally watched Uncharted not realizing it was based on... a video game of all things. It wasn't good. Nothing else was good either the past 2 years.
I'm not partial to old movies, but there are some gems, and they show how much you can do without modern VFX. I don't know what modern live-action movies were even improved by fancy effects besides The Matrix, which was awesome. Even when the scene is about action, it's cooler when it's realistic, like the Blues Brothers chase where they're actually driving 118 MPH and 104 real cars are getting wrecked.
Since Uncharted is an attempt to make a game series by putting AAA game stuff in the skeleton of an Indiana Jones movie, it suffers what they call “ludonarrative dissonance” by not just being a walking simulator game.
Indiana Jones might kill one guy per movie; Nathan Drake has shot thousands. He’s one of the most prolific mass killers in human history. And yet the cinematic parts of the game don’t seem to notice.
Uncharted the game series is as far as I know, an Indiana Jones movie except they made it into a video game by having Nathan Drake kill 100000 mooks constantly.
Are the movies the same? Just like an earlier movie but weirdly way more violent?
This Uncharted film seems like it really succeeded at the box office. $120M budget. Even if that gets bumped to $200M with marketing and say a bit more for more rev sharing, Sony will still come out with a profit. It’s at almost $150M in the US and might hit $400M worldwide with almost none of it coming from China or similar regions where their cut of ticket sales are much less.
All the non box office revenue kicking in should be decent. The film didn’t do well critically so that isn’t an issue. A recent non box office success example: https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/e2-80-98uncharted-e2-80-99-tops-e2-80-98the-batman-e2-80-99-on-vod-and-nears-24400-million-worldwide/ar-AAWPR4Y
I believe video games movies outside the recent Sonic one[s] are known to not perform well financially so that rep will still be there
If it wasn’t for Uncharted on PlayStation, I’d probably never have learned about Sir Francis Drake’s piracy on behalf of Queen Elizabeth I. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francis-Drake
He gave half the value to the Queen, which she used to pay off the country’s debt. The other half made him a very wealthy man.
I can’t wait for the movie this Friday! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1464335/
> our standards for story telling in video games are really low.
At the same time, the upcoming Uncharted movie is looking to be substantially less interesting than Uncharted 4.
I think the author is absolutely right that the standard for "good story" in games is incredibly low. Games are an immature medium that got catapulted into the mainstream on its other strengths (as challenge/sport/attractive gizmo) and not as art.
Unfortunately most of the current audience for games (particularly the vocal part) are people that were attracted by these aspects. I was definitely attracted by the technical feat/ingenious gizmo aspect. If you look at the way games have traditionally been reviewed, you can see that this aspect is incredibly important. These people tend to get upset at articles like this and overreact by claiming that the art aspects of their favourite games are better than they actually are.
That said, there are still the green shoots of an incredible artistic medium here and there. I am always on the lookout for things, however crude/I'm-14-and-this-is-deep they are, if they could only have been done in games.
Uncharted is a decent action adventure, probably as good as something like Jurassic World, but it could have been done in film.
Something like Journey, Her Story, Brothers etc, have aspects that could only have been done in games. They make (fairly crude) artistic points, in an intrinsically interactive way.
Just now, I’ve been watching all the 007 movies from the beginning
Turns out I never saw them before, and I’ve been to all these “exotic” locations as the aspirations have been deeply woven into our society!
Everything is so familiar because the tropes have been done so many times since, even video games have spent the last few decades trying to accurately simulate these same circumstances, looking at you, Uncharted!
I got the biggest kick when he brought out a bottle of “Don Perignon, 1953”. I’m pretty sure HIRED sent me one of those from 2009 and my guests were very impressed and pleased when I used it.