Uncharted is one of the more high profile video game adaptations in Hollywood these days. The film had recently hit a major snag with the departure of director David O. Russell and the possible loss of actor Mark Wahlberg. While Wahlberg's status is still unclear, at least the movie has a new director. Neil Burger (Limitless) has been brought on board to both direct and rewrite the film.

That's good news for fans of the mega-popular PS3 games. Still, this is a video game adaptation, and historically those haven't found much success in Hollywood. We have a few suggestions for how Uncharted can finally break the curse and do the games justice on screen.

When dealing with adventure, intrigue, treasure heists and the like, it's always best if a movie can be boiled down to a simple conflict and premise. Take Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example - what's the MacGuffin? Indiana Jones has to find the fabled Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis do. What happens if he fails? Hitler's armies gain untold power. It's simple, it's direct, and it worked for Indy.

The Uncharted movie should offer a simple and clear conflict for Nathan Drake. Non-gaming viewers have no attachment to this character. He's just an Indiana Jones without a hat and who can't keep his shirt tucked in. By giving Drake a memorable, well-paced adventure, these viewers will come to love him over the course of two hours just as PS3 gamers already have.



An engaging script will go a long way towards helping Uncharted succeed where just about every other video game adaptation has failed. But it will all be for nothing if the filmmakers can't pull off a convincing Nathan Drake.

Drake is a bad boy with a knack for getting in trouble. But action movies have plenty of those. He needs to be endearing and complex enough to stand apart from the pack. To use the Indiana Jones comparison again, he needs that roguish charm and inner appeal that makes the ladies fall in love with him and the men want to be him.

Can this be accomplished with Mark Wahlberg as Drake? We're not so sure. Marky Mark carries a lot of baggage from his earlier roles. And he already bombed once in a video game movie when he played vengeful cop Max Payne. Now that Russell is out of the picture, maybe it's best that Wahlberg seek greener pastures as well. Let this project get a completely fresh start with a new lead actor who is younger and better suited to the world of Nathan Drake.



The Uncharted games are amazingly cinematic. It's not so much the storylines that draw in gamers as the general presentation and the nonstop stream of action and adventure that each title offers. The reason Indiana Jones is so often brought up in comparison to Uncharted is that Nathan Drake really is a modern-day Indy. With the franchise moving to Hollywood, Uncharted has the chance to continue the Indiana Jones legacy and target that same audience.

Like the Indy or James Bond films, the Uncharted movie needs to bounce around the globe and offer viewers one memorable sight after another. Nathan Drake should never be allowed too much downtime as he confronts gun-toting henchmen or death-defying leaps around every corner. Like Indy, Drake shouldn't be presented as an invincible action hero, just a guy with a talent for getting himself into and out of sticky situations.



Too often, directors of video game movies feel they have to pay homage to the source material by borrowing familiar elements. In some cases, this means adapting a bare-bones plot that doesn't really work as a film (pretty much every fighting game movie ever made). In other cases it means relying on pointless visual trappings (Doom's infamous first-person sequence).

There's no reason to make that mistake in Uncharted. As it is, the games aren't plagued by that one defining trait everyone immediately thinks of when Uncharted is mentioned. No first-person perspective, no bullet-time, no 15-minute-long summon animations. The games are just about action, adventure and enjoyable characters.

We don't really want to see the movie struggle to adapt the plot of one of the games either. As long as the film has all the basic franchise qualities covered, there's no need to attempt to distill Uncharted 1 or 2's plot into a two-hour movie. Burger will find much more success in cooking up something new.



If you need a poster child for what can go wrong with video game adaptations, look no further than Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Granted, as far as these movies go it wasn't that bad. Still, PoP was meant to be the film that finally showed audiences how good video game adaptations can be. It failed in that mission, and there are any number of lessons to take away.

Here are a few. Don't cast Donnie Darko as Persian royalty. Make sure the lead actors have real screen chemistry. Don't try to adapt a specific game in the franchise. Don't waste an actor of Ben Kingsley's caliber. The list goes on and on.

With PoP fizzling and failing to become Disney's next Pirates of the Caribbean, it now falls on Uncharted to prove to audiences what video game movies are capable of. If it succeeds, we'll finally have that modern successor to Indiana Jones that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull wasn't. If it fails, well, there always seems to be a next time.

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