Tom Holland in Uncharted
(Picture: Handout)With Spider-Man: No Way Home now the sixth highest grossing film of all time, Tom Holland’s riding a wave. Given the way that video game adaptations tend to go, though, the true test of his star power will come with the release this week of his new film Uncharted.
Holland plays Nathan Drake, the likeably sarky treasure hunter at the centre of the Uncharted video game series (Mark Wahlberg stars alongside as Victor “Sully” Sullivan). Drake’s quests to find lost cities and trace priceless artefacts have made one of the biggest game series ever, shifting more than 41 million units. Indiana Jones and The Mummy are touchstones. But despite the cinematic inspiration, it’s faintly remarkable an Uncharted film has happened at all after about 15 years of rumours.
At one point, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci were meant to be in it. Superbad writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg turned down multiple invitations to do the script. Four or five directors have come and gone.
There’s a reason for that. Making a film based on a video game is generally an invitation to disaster, and they come in a few different varieties.
The most common is the kind which treats its source material with awed reverence, and demands you do too. Duncan Jones’ Warcraft did well at the box office but was bogged down by a script which desperately wanted you to take it as seriously as The Lord of the Rings. Its subtitle – The Beginning – turned out to be wishful thinking.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, most notable for starring a ridiculously beefy Jake Gyllenhaal and his swishy curtains (who knew the 9th century and the 90s had so much in common?), had the same problem. Assassin’s Creed was even worse for puffed up pomp. The cast included heavyweights such as Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons and Michael K. Williams, but none were a match for the portentous guff they had to spout.
Seeing dialogue like, “It’s 2016 – no-one cares about freedom,” coming tumbling out of the mouth of a living, breathing human being is far more jarring on the big screen than it would be in the context of a game. Had a random non-player character (NPC) said that mid-mission, you’d shrug it off. When it’s Charlotte Rampling, you start wondering if anyone actually gives a toss about what they’re making - and how much she’s getting paid.
The shameless intellectual property cash-in is less common than it once was, but nobody who’s seen Bob Hoskins in the 1993 Super Mario Bros movie – the first video game to cross over into film – will forget it in a hurry. The hope there, as with a lot of video game adaptations, is that the existing fanbase will carry it through any bumpy reviews.
Unfortunately there is no fanbase in the world rabid enough to carry Super Mario Bros. Mario and Luigi, two Brooklyn plumbers, venture into an alternate universe where humanoid dinosaurs rule. The critic Kim Newman, in Empire magazine, called it “a shrill, hectic and tiresome fantasy with little story, less excitement and no imaginable audience”.
“The level of inspiration here can be clued by the name of the dinosaur alternate world’s Manhattan,” said the LA Times. “It’s called ‘Dinohattan’.”
Then there’s the lesser-spotted games-as-cheap-plot-switcharoo, most recently deployed in 2019 by Peaky Blinders showrunner Steven Knight in Serenity (riding at 21 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes). About two thirds of the way through, Matthew McConaughey’s Baker Dill realises that (spoiler alert) he’s not a man trying to land a gigantic yellowfin tuna named Justice after all – he’s a piece of AI in a game designed by his son after the real him died in Iraq. It was meant to be an M. Night Shyamalan-style coup de théâtre. At the screening I attended, people actually cackled.
When James Stevenson from video game developers Insomniac was asked about a film adaptation of Ratchet & Clank (a humanoid cat and a robot travel through the universe, saving it with extravagant weapons) in 2013, he made it sound easy: “Ratchet & Clank‘s action, humour and galaxy-spanning adventures have really been the basis for a fantastic game series, and we think it would translate perfectly to the big screen.”
After Ratchet & Clank lost $7 million at the box office, Stevenson might have revised his opinion. There are good reasons why games rarely work when they’re transported straight across to the big screen. For one, beloved characters who’ve been merrily 1-UPing their way into fans’ hearts in two dimensions can suddenly become nightmarish in three. Sonic the Hedgehog’s unlikely success only came after fans revolted against a trailer that showed Sonic as having human teeth.
Of course, games nick things from films all the time: there’d be no Red Dead Redemption without Sergio Leone and John Ford’s Westerns; no Mafia trilogy without Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola’s mob films; no Grand Theft Auto without Falling Down.
But pinching a vista design here or a character archetype there doesn’t change the fact that games and films don’t tell stories in the same way. The biggest games, like Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead, are exploratory and episodic. Rambling around a nicely evoked world and occasionally getting into some scrapes might work for Richard Linklater, but nobody’s about to stick $200 million into an Elder Scrolls hangout movie. The honourable exception here is Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, which plugged arcade-inspired graphics and a level-based structure into an indie romance to dazzling effect.
The storytelling of games is basically about the choices you make; the storytelling of films is about trusting the choices the director makes. The idea that players might be moved by a video game protagonist is relatively new. The Last of Us, built around the bleakly affecting story of post-apocalyptic survivors Joel and teenager Ellie as they dodge rabid quasi-zombies, felt like a quantum leap when it landed in 2013.
Characters in decent films are driven by emotional stakes and rely on whoever’s watching to sympathise with what they want; that’s not something you could say of, for instance, Crash Bandicoot.
Cleave too closely to a game and you end up with a robotic, clunky actioner with nothing at its heart. Reflecting on the ill-fated Super Mario Bros movie, Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto hit the nail on the head: “It became a movie that was about a videogame, rather than being an entertaining movie in and of itself.” It also became a movie about Dennis Hopper being a crocodile-man who loved sloshing about in mud.
That feeling of personal complicity and achievement which games can evoke is something that’s nearly impossible to recreate at the cinema. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is the only choose-your-own-adventure film that’s really worked. Named for a real, unreleased game but set around the making of a fictitious one, there’s something in its concerns about fate, free will and control which other games adaptations should take note of.
Still, films which take games as their inspiration rather than their raison d’être can play in worlds with more elastic rules and liquid boundaries, and tangle with big, knotty philosophical ideas without the self-seriousness and complex lore that sci-fi can end up saddled with.
Last year’s Free Guy is set in a GTA 5-ish, Fortnite-ish massively multiplayer online game in which Ryan Reynolds’ Guy is an insignificant NPC who realises he actually does have the power to affect the world around him. By the end of the film he’s evolved into a piece of sentient artificial intelligence who’s seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Unlike Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, though, he’s got license to be playful and buoyant in a way that a piece of hard sci-fi based on a Philip K. Dick story wouldn’t generally allow. Will Free Guy change the way the future looks on film for the next 40 years? Not likely. Was it an immediate hit? Yes.
Gameworlds can be a place to explore near-future tech without getting bogged down in practicalities, too. Tron was a platform to showcase cutting edge graphics while pointing toward augmented reality, and while Ready Player One might not have been amazing, it did explore the idea of the metaverse well before Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s pivot towards it.
The video game films that tend to work are the ones which go into the cloud and pull things apart, rather than insisting on pulling digital worlds into live action. That’s harder for a film based on a real game to do, of course. Once you’ve paid for the rights to a world, characters and story that people like, it’s a little obtuse to start kicking the whole thing to pieces.
But the point stands that being more alive to the possibilities of rich, warping gameworlds is one way of avoiding making a piece of dull brand extension that disappoints or enrages fans and bores casual viewers.
Whether Uncharted bucks the trend for underpowered, overserious game adaptations remains to be seen (at least by audiences - this paper’s critic Charlotte O’Sullivan’s lukewarm response was “not hateful”). Holland himself has an eye on more video game adaptations, including his dream project: a live-action film based on the turn of the millennium adventure platformer, Jak and Daxter. “But I would make it at [the independent film production and distribution company] A24, so it was really weird and dark,” Holland has said.
Clearly, he doesn’t need my advice. But Tom, as a friend: maybe think about hitting pause.
