Video of the Week: Uncharted – The Movie
Anyone that’s played at least one of the three Uncharted games knows that it’s a franchise ripe for a proper Hollywood conversion. However, after the rage that resulted in last years’ highly publicised news of David O. Russell being placed in the directors chair and that fatal casting decision of Mark ‘Funky Bunch’ Wahlberg, most fans have been left to wonder whether they want a movie at all anymore.
So we come to our latest video of the week, and the unbridled passion that Uncharted super fan, YouTube user morphinapg most definitely possesses. We’re going to take our foot off the pedal though and let morphinapg do all the explaining.
Considering this is the best game series I’ve ever played, and certainly the most cinematic, I decided to make them into movies. I decided that I would include every cinematic, and link them by the minimum gameplay needed to connect the cinematics without creating any plot holes. Obviously to do this I had to take out certain sections of gameplay, but doing so does not have any effect on story. As I was trying to make these as close to a real movie experience as I could, there were a few guidelines I decided to follow:
1. I would try to remove as many on screen references to this being a game as possible, such as chapter titles and button or new ammo prompts. Some of these would either be impossible or would too much negatively impact the quality of the film, such as the near constant ammo OSD, or the occasional “select” prompt for drake’s journal during puzzles.
2. I would try to include as much of the puzzles, in game cinematics and cinematic gameplay elements as I could. Some areas still needed to be cut to keep the movie flowing properly or, in the case of Uncharted 2 and 3, to keep the run length shorter than it would have been otherwise.
3. I tried to keep as much in game dialogue as I could, as I believe those really help develop the characters. However, as I said, I also had to keep an eye on how much gameplay I was using to make sure it didn’t make things too boring or make the movie too long.
In the end, my goal was to make a movie that would be watchable whether the viewer was a fan of Uncharted or not, and whether the viewer was a video game player or not. My initial reason was to find a way to show the story of these games to people in my family who don’t play video games. I think I succeeded.
It’s a hell of a task and as Uncharted fans ourselves, we can say nothing else but… thank you. For everyone else, grab a bag of chips, microwave some popcorn and pop open a can of coke, because this is bound to be the best Uncharted movie you will ever see.
