The Uncharted movie trailer showcases Tom Holland in the role of Nathan Drake, but it also remakes some iconic moments from the Uncharted video games. While the Uncharted has been stuck in development hell for over a decade and has seen its release date pushed back many times, it is set to finally arrive in February 2022. The October 2021 trailer gives audiences the first real look at how the movie will adapt Nathan Drake and the Uncharted franchise.
The four main entries in Naughty Dog's Uncharted video game series follow the protagonist Nathan Drake (Tom Holland in the movie, Nolan North in the games) and his older mentor Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg in the movie, Richard McGonagle in the games). Together they seek lost mythical treasures and face off against the terrible curses that are often attached to those treasures. Gamers are still eager to see a fifth game in the main Uncharted series, especially as a spinoff title following the game characters Chloe Frazer and Nadine Ross was well-received. The new movie is set to be a prequel to the main events of the game but takes place after the pre-established childhood of Drake and his meeting of Sully that is shown in Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.
The Uncharted video games are a beloved franchise and fans of the series are wary of whether the adaptation will ultimately fail, as so many video game adaptations have done before. However, the trailer shows off a lot of moments that demonstrate the creators understand the tone of Uncharted and have included a lot of scenes that pay small homages to moments from the games, from piecing together bits of maps, the memorable dusty museum cases, and Drake pushing his way through old caverns with a flaming torch. The movie even works to establish the origin of Nathan Drake and Chloe Frazer’s relationship. However, there are two moments that prove that the creators have truly captured the cinematic sense of the original games.
Drake's Uncharted 3 Plane Fight
A key sequence in the Uncharted movie trailer sees Tom Holland’s Nathan Drake struggling his way up a series of crates that are trailing from the back of a cargo plane before he is eventually knocked from the plane by a falling car. While this scene has all the hallmarks of a big Hollywood production, it walks the line between homage and a shot-for-shot remake of a scene from Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. After sneaking aboard a cargo plane, Drake loosens the cargo to knock a gunman away and ends up clambering up crates while fighting enemies in a nearly identical way. Despite the similarities, it is clear that this is still an homage rather than a recreation of the event from the game, considering that the movie takes place over water, whereas the original Uncharted 3 scene is above the Ru’ Al Khali desert.
Drake’s Uncharted 4 Hidden Ship Discovery
Another key Uncharted trailer scene shows Nathan Drake finding a pair of ships in an underground cavern. This is a clear tribute to one of the final scenes from Nathan Drake’s final outing in the games where he finds a ship in a very similar situation in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. As with the plane, this is not intended to be an adaption of the scene from the game, as based on the context of the trailer these ships are part of Magellan’s lost ships, whereas in Uncharted 4 the ship is the location of Henry Avery’s treasure trove. These scenes allow for the movie to maintain itself as a prequel to the franchise while giving great easter eggs to longtime fans of the game. However, it does imply that the entire Uncharted timeline has a somewhat cyclical nature for Nathan Drake’s story, with him reliving similar events in the movie.
