5 things the Uncharted games deliver that the film series needs to add

It’s one of the most memorable in media res openings in all of gaming, as well as a textbook introduction to the “Oh, wait, it always gets worse” tendencies that dominate Nathan Drake’s adventuring life: Our hero waking up, disoriented, and strapped into a wrecked train car. First, he reaches down, and realizes that he’s bleeding heavily from a stomach wound. Then he realizes that the car he’s in is currently suspended vertically… and hanging halfway off a cliff somewhere high in the Himalayas. Panic, and desperate climbing, understandably ensue.

It’s a hell of an opening (reminiscent of the “Oh, shit!” energy Adrien Brody projects in the first 60 seconds of 2010’s underrated Predators) that would work just as well in live action as it did in 2009’s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. The Uncharted games are masterpieces of pace, above all else, and the first five minutes of Among Thieves establishes that relentless energy right from the jump.

Ain’t that always the way: You’re minding your own business, exploring a ruined mansion, and solving puzzles cribbed straight out of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. Then the floor gives way, some goons show up, and suddenly you’re running for your life from giant spiders through the catacombs of a burning building. At least you don’t need to collect any world-saving artifacts while doing so—for now, anyway.

Great Uncharted fights are all about projecting at least the illusion of controlled chaos, and the chaos rarely hits peaks as high as Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception’s “Stay In The Light.” Ambushed by agents of an evil secret society, Nate and his old pal/mentor Sully (both looking, bare minimum, 15 years older than Holland and Wahlberg, respectively) have to navigate the inferno, the armed gunmen, and their never-ending banter, as they try to drag yet another “Well, at least we survived that” moment from the flaming jaws of defeat.

As far as adaptations go, Uncharted the movie is pretty loose; while the film imports at least a few of the games’ biggest moments into its standard action film formula, it only brings three named characters along for the ride in any meaningful way: Drake, Sully, and Sophia Ali as enigmatic fellow treasure hunter Chloe. The most notable absence from the series’ cast, then, is Nate’s primary love interest: Elena Fisher, a daring investigative journalist played in the Uncharted games by actor Emily Rose.

We can understand it, sort of: Pairing Nate—especially a version of the character as young as Holland projects—off with his future wife might make things feel a little too settled, too fast. But Elena’s not just some random distressed damsel who can be easily written off: She’s an adventurer just as active and engaged as Nathan himself, and her occasionally strained partnership with him is one of the major emotional through-lines of the entire series. Robbing Uncharted of that cornerstone relationship can only leave any future proceedings feeling as hollow as a raided tomb.

Nobody plummets like Nathan Drake—something Uncharted the movie tries to emphasize with its adaptation of the famous “Nate falls out of a plane” bit from Uncharted 3. But true connoisseurs of Drake Vs. Gravity know that some of the best material comes in 2016’s Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End—and especially in “The Thieves Of Libertalia,” one of the game’s biggest show-off moments.

The setup is as arcane as all the rest of the series’ plots: Artifacts, rival gangs, complicated fraternal relationships. The important takeaways are much simpler: Collapsing towers, swinging ropes, screaming Drakes. One of the appeals of the series has always been the way it makes the clearly impossible look just barely survivable, and nothing embodies that better than watching explosions, gunfire, and malevolent architecture all take their shot at killing the same insistently yelling man. (Especially the malevolent architecture—that tower is a behemoth.)

For all their running and yelling and exploding, the Uncharted games wouldn’t work, at all, if the writers and performers at developer Naughty Dog didn’t have an iron grip on the characters at the heart of them. In the sketches, Nathan Drake is little more than a cipher, a collection of movie tropes shoved into a CGI skin. It’s only in motion, in carefully crafted dialogue, and in the voice performance of series star Nolan North, that the character becomes no mere pastiche, but a winning action hero in his own right.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the quiet early moments of A Thief’s End, which see Nathan and Elena try to adjust to a stab at domestic life by sitting down to play some video games together. It’s not just a fun Easter egg referencing Naughty Dog’s past—Nate’s playing Crash Bandicoot, one of the studio’s first hits—it’s also quiet and lived-in and confident in the way only something that knows it’s going to blow your head off later can be. That same command of pacing that we highlighted above, after all, also involves knowing when to pause and actually take a breath.

Plus: We really want to hear Tom Holland say “Crash Bandicoot.”