Sony’s film adaptation of their groundbreaking video game franchise Uncharted has certainly regained life with Stranger Things‘ Shawn Levy coming aboard to direct a seemingly faithful script treatment from Joe Carnahan (The Grey). Speaking to ComingSoon, Carnahan discussed the likely MPAA rating, action, and inevitable Indiana Jones comparisons.
Carnahan states “When I wrote Uncharted I didn’t spare the rod. I wrote it the way the video game is. They swear in the game, they’re kinda foul-mouthed and I kept all that stuff intact and I definitely didn’t write it as a PG-13 movie, I wrote it the way that movie should be written. PG-13 in a lot of ways is a cop out, and I think its been exposed as such.”
What’s interesting is that although Uncharted does contain quite a bit of foul language, the F word is never uttered. Maybe he means that the blockbuster will earn an R rating based on violence alone, which is very well possible as even though the games are rated Teen, there are still grisly images the MPAA might take issue with.
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Speaking of the trademark action set-pieces, Carnahan excitedly expressed “I probably wrote four of the biggest, fuckin’ craziest action sequences I think I’ve ever written in that movie. I used the Uncharted games as a template but not using any one specifically, because those sequences have already been done beautifully. There’s no point in just transposing them to film, you’ve gotta come up with new shit, so that’s what I did. It was a great challenge but it was a lot of fun.”
Carnahan said on comparisons to Indiana Jones: “Listen, I’m a huge Indiana Jones fan, which was one of my interests in it and you have to remember you’ve got Sully as well, so it’s more of a buddy situation than just Drake solo. You have this kind of Hope & Crosby, Road to Morocco kind of thing, so it’s not a straight Indy lift. Drake is not a guy who likes museums. He thinks they’re all crooked. Curators are “thieves,” the guys in the Louvre and The Met are thieves and despicable. He’s a treasure hunter, not an archaeologist. He doesn’t have Indiana Jones’ idea of pure faith in archaeology. That’s not the way he thinks. It differentiates, and in the script there are deliberate differentiations. He has a line where he says, “They’re gonna be looking at real booby traps, not rolling boulder bullshit.”
A descendant of explorer Sir Francis Drake, a treasure hunter named Nathan Drake believes he has learned the whereabouts of El Dorado, the fabled South American golden city, a cursed golden statue. the search becomes competitive when a rival hunter joins the fray.”
Originally published February 24, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
