One day after leaked footage from the Uncharted movie made the rounds, Sony officially dropped the trailer for the film. I can’t believe I’m saying this — especially given the, uh, history of films based on video games — but it actually looks pretty sick. Check it out:
Directed by Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, Venom, some ads for Burger King), the Uncharted film is a prequel of sorts to the games starring Tom Holland (Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) as Nathan Drake. Other characters from the games show up too, including Mark Wahlberg as Victor “Sully” Sullivan and Sophia Ali as Chloe Frazier. Antonio Banderas is in the film as an unnamed character who, based on some of his dialogue (“So much blood”), is probably the villain.
Yesterday, you may have seen some blurry footage on social media showing the trailer’s most thrilling sequence: Drake, falling out of a cargo plane, opening several cans of whoop-arse on baddies while trying to clamber his way up some boxes back to the plane’s hold. (It’s an obvious callback to a similar moment in Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception.)
The Uncharted adaptation has had a long road to the silver screen, with the production pipeline dating back at least a decade. In 2011, Oscar-nominated director David O. Russell was attached to direct, with Mark Wahlberg slated to play Drake. The movie then languished in development hell for a while. In 2019, Variety reported that Wahlberg was re-attached to the project, this time as Drake’s mentor figure Sully, though the character’s signature mustache is sadly nowhere to be seen.
Whether this official film ends up being a success or not, live-action Uncharted has already seen at least one solid showing. In 2018, director Allan Ungar put out a terrific fan film starring Nathan Fillion — pitch-perfect casting for Nathan Drake, right down to the name.
Uncharted is showing exclusively in theatres on February 18, 2022, smack in the middle of a release period that’ll see every single anticipated video game of next year come out.
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