Uncharted: Another Lackluster Video Game Movie

Movies based on video games rarely work. There are many reasons for this, most commonly cited of which is that a video game will take over 10 hours, with the average being somewhere between 15 and 20 hours, to complete the narrative while a movie will only take about two hours. The other differences in storytelling are inconsequential for Uncharted because the major issues in this movie result from the narrative failings that come from cramming all that story into a two-hour ordeal.

To get the technical issues out of the way, the movie does have a few glaring issues that come from poor editing. The easiest to notice are instances that come from cutting between shots during a dialogue exchange and a character who is speaking the dialogue is visibly not speaking in the shot. This is a relatively simple thing to prevent from happening with another take and dubbing over the audio, but it is indicative of laziness during production.

The movie is concerned with attempting to deliver as much information as possible to make the movie something that resembles comprehensible. It’s a strange situation because it seems like the problem comes from fundamental issues with the movie at the most basic level. There is a ton of exposition that is needed for this movie to work including family relationships, relationships between friends, the fundamentals of the pseudo-history that causes the movie to work, and the inner workings of the various conflicts that move the movie along. As a result, the movie ends up being a lengthy exercise in expositing as much information as possible while still keeping the general structure of a narrative feature.

What ends up happening is the emotional moments end up falling completely flat. As the midway point is reached, the issue becomes that major reveals end up not hitting the crescendo that they should be because of the combination of the fact that the majority of that movie has been characters talking at each other about the plot and the fact that no two characters trust each other for any substantive length of time for the duration of the movie so when the reveal happens, it has no impact.

Fundamentally, when a movie does not have an emotional hook for the audience, it is a failure of storytelling. No matter how charming the cast may be, and Tom Holland definitely is, it is not enough to salvage a movie with an unfulfilling narrative. The same goes for action sequences, even if the action sequences do some interesting new things. The story is the most important thing a movie has to deliver and Uncharted just proves that most video games should not attempt to leave the medium they originated in.

Final Rating: 5/10