Treasure hunters better beware, because here comes Nathan Drake: International Treasure Cop.
The casting of Mark Wahlberg in the lead role isn’t the only piece of distressing news about the Uncharted movie; director David O. Russell has also tweaked the script to give protagonist Nathan Drake a whole new history and motivation.
While the Uncharted games depict Nathan Drake as a Indiana Jones/Mal Reynolds-style treasure hunter and adventurer, Russell’s movie will recast him and his hitherto unseen family as some kind of antiquities police. “This idea really turns me on that there’s a family that’s a force to be reckoned with in the world of international art and antiquities,” he said. “[A family] that deals with heads of state and heads of museums and metes out justice.”
Russell said that he wanted to have the family dynamic in the movie to provide some solid character content, overlaid over the “bigger, more muscular stage” of an action movie. Russell added that he was almost halfway through writing the script, saying that the work was going remarkably quickly.
The changes to the source material don’t necessarily mean that Uncharted is going to be a bad movie, but it sounds like it’s not going to be the movie that fans of the games hoped it would be either. Russell is a talented writer and director, however, so perhaps we’ll be surprised.
Published: Dec 2, 2010 01:16 pm