"But Drake, I thought we already made an Uncharted movie. You know, Uncharted, the videogame."
Okay, so there shouldn’t be an Uncharted movie, you guys. Uncharted 2 ranks as one of my favorite games of all time, but that doesn’t mean I want to see it turned into a movie. There are quality games that could be separate yet equal experiences as movies. Halo comes to mind. A Bioshock movie could be done right. But the Uncharted games are already cinematic experiences. They’ve already hired real actors and had those real actors do the voices and the mo-cap. Uncharted is already a movie, it’s just a movie that you also happen to be playing through.
Nathan Drake, the protagonist of the Uncharted games, is already a fully-formed character. He already has a voice, he already has a look, and both of those are performed or inspired by an existing actor: Nolan North. So when the Uncharted fanboys like me are freaking out over the casting of Mark Wahlberg as Nathan Drake, it’s not because we’re just being stupid fanboys. This casting makes the Uncharted film worse than the Spider-Man reboot. It’s taking a character and world and story that we’ve just recently experienced and loved, gutting it, recasting it, and propping it up like a real-life scene of Weekend at Bernies. So when the fanboys were chanting Nathan Fillion for Nathan Drake, they were doing it because the character of Nathan Drake is already so heavily influenced by Fillion’s Malcolm Reynolds that he’s the only established film actor we can see filling those shoes. I mean, because Harrison Ford is too old. And the casting of Marky Mark isn’t flawed because Marky Mark is a bad actor, it’s flawed because it shows how little the moviemakers are paying attention to the source material. Continue reading
