Welp.
Uncharted’s Nathan Drake won bragging rights.
According to a Yahtzee-Craze study, people search the most for the following three movies-turned-games:
The Need for Speed (2014).
Sonic the Hedgehog (2022).
And the winner was 2022’s Uncharted.
But fans quickly pointed out that just because people searched for these movies does not mean these movies were popular with video game players.
The Uncharted Disaster
“I knew this was not really Uncharted,” said Tyler Cole, 36, who has been playing the video game since 2008. “It was Uncharted in name only.”
“They took bits of every (Uncharted) game and threw it in a blender,” Cole said. The directors picked different landmark scenes from the blended mixture and stuck the scenes into the movie without a straightforward plotline.
The video game is about a group of treasure hunters, led by Nate Drake, who travel across the Earth to solve historical mysteries and find priceless artifacts and gold. Others who travel with Holland to solve antiquity’s puzzle include Victor “Sully” Sullivan, a fortune hunter who’s Drake’s confidante and friend, and Elena Fisher, an investigative reporter.
She is chronicling the group’s adventures. By the fourth Uncharted video game adventure, A Thief’s End, Fisher is married to Drake, and the two have a child.
But the movie, where Tom Holland stars as Drake and Mark Wahlberg stars as Sullivan, does not follow much of the video game’s plot. Drake’s wife (Fisher) is missing from the movie, and the creators decided to add extra characters who never appeared in the video games: Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas) and Jo Braddock (Tati Gabrielle).
From the beginning, Cole said he knew the movie would not do the video game justice.
After seeing the trailer, Cole said he could not muster watching the movie. Cole said filmmakers may have thought using Holland to portray Nate Drake, the video game’s protagonist, was the best way to sell the film. After all, Holland is Spider-Man, and Spider-Man sells.
It’s no coincidence filmmakers released the movie two months after Spider-Man hit the box office. The problem was “Holland was basically Peter Parker through the entire movie,” he said.
And while Holland may have said he played the Uncharted video games, his acting showed he had no idea how to portray Drake’s personality, Cole said. When seeing the trailer and clips, he would ask himself about Holland’s claim of seeing the movie,” Did you though? You don’t even act like Nate.”
Cole also noted in a quick e-mail Holland even lacked Drake’s well-known haircut and belt buckle. Drake’s haircut has its own name, the Uncharted haircut, as pointed out by Dr. HairStyle.
And the belt buckle is not something fashion designers should have missed. Many websites and videos show how to dress up like Drake, a popular character for cosplay fans. These include sites such as How to Dress Like Nathan Drake and a video, Making a Nathan Drake Belt Buckle Replica.
In one review from We Got This Covered, Jonathan Wright pointed out Nate is an older playboy with an adventure streak while Holland looks like a teenage scientist ready to go to an Ivy League School.
Cole is not the only one who has the same thoughts. His friend, Tyler Hickman, 36, another Uncharted enthusiast, also agreed.
They had Nate Drake look like he was perpetually 17, said Hickman, who watched the movie and was disappointed with its outcome. The set’s fashion designers dressed Holland like he was Peter Parker. “He’s doing a lot of the same acrobats and stunts that Peter Parker would do,” Hickman said.
Hickman wasn’t happy with the selection of Mark Wahlberg for the portrayal of Sully either. Instead, he wanted someone like Sean Connery for the role.
“Instead, we got Marky Mark,” Hickman said. “He doesn’t come across as a mentor. He’s a bumbling idiot – doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
No Finish Line for Need For Speed
Fans were also disappointed with another top-three contender in the movie-to-video-game category: The Need for Speed, which starred Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul and The Preacher’s Dominic Cooper.
The reception to Need for Speed was lukewarm. Reviews applauded the stunts, but everything else did not live up to expectations. It didn’t help that The Need for Speed video games lacked an engaging plot, some fans said.
In the video game, players participate in illegal street racing in hopes of making it to the League, an underground scene. To enter, they must complete felonious races under the nose of local law enforcement.
On the RogerEbert.com site, Odie Henderson wrote in her review the movie “wears on its sleeve the desperation of trying to create another macho racing franchise like The Fast and the Furious. That series had six movies to create, shape, modify and solidify its mythology.
With five fewer tries, Need for Speed aims for F&F’s level of goofy, fan-pleasing grandiosity while attempting the existential vengeance vibe of Drive. The resulting mishmash is as exciting as getting a tow from AAA and just as slow.”
Eggman Robotnik and Sonic Deliver
Meanwhile, unlike the reception of the Uncharted movie, other movie-based video games garnered respect from fans.
“I’m surprised it was as good as it was,” said Richard May, 44, a lead programmer at Rebellion Development about Sonic the Hedgehog.
Rebellion, headquartered in Oxford in the United Kingdom, is known for creating video games. Its flagship video game is Sniper Elite. Other of its popular video games include the Zombie Army series and Evil Genius 2.
May recalled having that sinking feeling in his stomach, where he expected the movie would be a disaster.
Watching the movie’s early trailer didn’t help ease the knots in his stomach. May and most other fans became mortified at Sonic’s appearance in the trailer.
“Oh my God, what have they done,” he thought back to his reaction to the character’s look. “This will be a terrible movie.”
Graphic artists couldn’t get the right balance between Sonic’s presentation in a live-action movie and the video game, May said.
Fans had a similar outcry. According to a BGR article, “Fans absolutely hated and ripped apart aspects of the movie’s original Sonic design, like his unsightly long legs and his weird full set of gleaming white teeth….”
To appease the fans, director Jeff Fowler directed his CGI team to redesign the Sonic character, even though the reworking of the character caused the movie’s original release date of November 2019 to be pushed back to Valentine’s Day of 2020.
The late release may have cost more money, but moviegoers provided a warm and welcoming reception to the movie. Fans felt filmmakers heard their voices.
The delay gave people a lot more faith in the producers and directors,” said Joshua Cartridge, May’s coworker at Rebellion, who is an analyst. Cartridge said this move to make sure the character catered to the fans’ desires made him respect the filmmakers more.
Cartridge said he appreciated how the filmmakers wanted “to make sure (the game) was right for the fans as well as the new audience.”
May also endorsed one of the movie’s stars, Jim Carrey, who portrayed the evil Dr. Robotnik.
“How do you take a character that is literally called Eggman – how do you make that live-action work? I was really impressed with Jim Carrey’s portrayal…He did a really good job, making it interesting.”
Another pro to video games and movies? Both are child-friendly, May, the father of two, said.
Growing up with a video game programmer for a father, May said it was natural for Evelyn, his daughter, who is 9, to take an interest in gaming. She is following in May’s footsteps, and Sonic is one of her most-played games. She started playing when she was 5.
“She definitely enjoys playing video games,” May said.
And Sonic works well as a game for youngsters. In the two-person game, May plays the role of Sonic and Evelyn plays Miles “Tails” Prower, another character in the game, a cub fox with two distinct tails – hence his name.
The “Tails character can’t die,” May said. “He keeps coming back to life.”
So when playing the video game, if Evelyn made a mistake as Tails, it didn’t matter. The only character who controls the game’s outcome is Sonic, and May usually plays that role.
May took Evelyn and his son, Alexander, 4, to see the first movie. Both kids watch Sonic Boom, the cartoon, so Alexander is already familiar with the hedgehog and his friends.
“I think he enjoyed the movie more than Evelyn,” May said. Evelyn preferred playing the game. But she was excited when Tails appeared at the movie’s end.
“I think she spent the entire movie wondering where Tails was,” he said.
Other video games that made it to the top 10 included: Monster Hunter, Hitman, Rampage, Silent Hill, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, Warcraft, and Detective Pikachu.
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This article was produced and syndicated by Wealth of Geeks.
Featured Image Credit: Sony Pictures Ent.
Rasha is a die-hard bookaholic, but when she’s not reading, she watches TV shows with her husband. He’s in charge of the remote because he certainly doesn’t trust her with one. If he did, they would be watching “Law and Order” reruns all day. She is a former reporter who now works in the social work industry, connecting people with essential resources and agencies. Other than that, Rasha is currently using her superpower, writing, to deliver the news.
