AN OBSESSION WITH ANCIENT HIDDEN TREASURE IS WEIRD

An obsession with Uncharted is less weird

On February 24 at 6:10 p.m, I received this text from my friend: “R u doing anything tonight/ would u like to come to Uncharted at Providence Place,” to which I sent an immediate response, “omg would love to what time?” to which they said “8:15,” to which I said “Wait amazing I am so excited.” They followed up with, “Also not sure if some of our party is pregaming but ur welcome to if that’s ur vibe,” to which I responded with “Oooo sounds fun! I have to do some hw before though so perhaps tonight is not my pregame night,” which would have made my mother proud, were she aware of the exchange.

Those six texts, give or take, are how I ended up in the back right of an almost-empty Providence Place movie theater, sober, absorbed by the story of Mark Wahlberg, a seasoned and jaded “treasure hunter” (according to the blurb that arises from a Google search), who recruits pickpocketing bartender Tom Holland to help him hunt for Ferdinand Magellan’s lost gold, yes, the colonizer, and no, it doesn’t address that. The movie, based on a video game series of the same name, takes a slew of name-brand actors across European marvels, ruins, and rooftops (but only the pretty ones), fighting, stabbing, and man-bonding their way toward hidden piles of gold. All so Mark Wahlberg can pick up the broken pieces of his time-weathered, cynical little soul and learn to trust again.

The two hours that passed between climbing up the theater’s gray-carpeted, LED-brightened stairs and climbing down the theater’s gray-carpeted, LED-brightened stairs felt like an avalanche of every action trope that’s ever existed in any capacity, piling higher and higher, snowballing further and further into sheer spectacle for the sake of spectacle. It spirals into absurdity fast, from the moment that Tom Holland, voicing over an opening montage of his fraught childhood, states in a desperate attempt at profundity, “There are places you can’t find on a map. They’re not gone, they’re just lost.” I wanted to give him slam poetry-style snaps right there in the theater, because, really, so true, Tom.

My favorite instance of this absurdity is that Tom Holland is a bartender, and that that somehow remains relevant throughout the movie—even when he’s sprinting away from gangsters in a secret nightclub under a centuries-old church in Barcelona. And also when he’s hiding from more gangsters under the deck of one of Ferdinand Magellan’s recently-discovered ships in a cave in the Philippines. He twirls bottles of gin to impress a pretty, irrelevant female bar patron, makes a mean Negroni, and lights a puddle of vodka on fire. All of this from a maybe-kleptomaniac orphan with a missing brother. The past? It can’t keep him down.

In a similar vein, Uncharted is, for no clear reason, utterly steeped in ruthless murder. Maybe it’s because all three people who wrote the screenplay are violence-infatuated men. Maybe it’s because of a societal fascination with death. More likely it’s for the spectacle. Either way, Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg kill basically everyone and feel absolutely fine about it. I thought that killing someone also kills a part of your own self-perception, shakes you to your core, erodes your sense of purpose. But in Uncharted, killing someone is totally cool, as long as they’re evil and you’re dating Zendaya.

The female characters also embody this sense of over-the-top absurdity, but their brand of spectacle is a little different in was that is in equal parts predictable and, yeah, sexual. Tati Gabrielle wears lacy black corsets during hand-to-hand combat; Sophia Taylor Ali’s entire personality is based around copious amounts of eyeliner. At one point, she enters the living room of her unbelievably nice apartment with her bathrobe dripping from one shoulder. It felt forced. Nobody looks that good in terry cloth.

As Tom Holland and Sophia Taylor Ali are trapped in an underground cellar filling rapidly with water, Mark Wahlberg tells them over the phone that he’s “literally in a Papa John’s right now.” When the gang walks into an ancient church seeking treasure and instead encounters clergy, Tom Holland says, “Oh, great. Nuns. Why does it always gotta be nuns?” And, of course, there’s Sophia Taylor Ali’s whispered goodbye to Tom Holland, “You’re a nice kid…. Too nice.” There’s no complex morality, no ambiguous meaning. There’s absolutely nothing to latch onto except the absurdity, which consumed the movie and consumed me.

Halfway through, I had to pee, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to leave the theater. It was like watching a mindless trainwreck—if that trainwreck had a $120 million budget. For a week or so after, all I wanted to talk about was Uncharted. Making fun of the movie became my own incessant avalanche of pointlessness, my conversations snowballing further and further into Tom-Holland-Mark-Wahlberg-GoldHeist territory, entertaining not because of any genuine love, but because of my own twisted need to ridicule. My skepticism of the genre is what pushed me into this morbid fascination, warping my perspective into believing that this movie is one of the funniest I’ve ever seen.

The moments where the writers injected arbitrary moments of emotion to cater toward Box Office sales especially dragged my cynicism to the forefront of my brain; Uncharted’s random, halfhearted attempts at insight during haphazard, unrestrained chaos wracked me with an inability to take a single second seriously. The movie tried to give characters depth in the same way that a toddler tries to speak: things get garbled in translation, but the effort is still sort of cute. In this case, though, the toddler was learning to talk in order to make a huge amount of money, and it only says things like “There’s only one rule in this game, kid. Don’t get caught.”

When Tom Holland’s brother gave young Tom Holland his last piece of bubblegum in a gesture of brotherly connection right before running away, leaving adolescent Tom alone, helpless, and innocent in a stern orphanage, all I could think about was that the symbol of his intense heartbreak was a stick of gum. When, at the end of the movie, this motif of bubblegum returns and Tom Holland gives Mark Wahlberg his last piece as they fly over the West Indies in a stolen helicopter, I didn’t consider their character arcs or the trust they gained in one another. All I could wonder was how old the gum was. Even now, I can’t conceptualize any way to take the characters seriously. I don’t even remember their names. I can only think of them as Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg.

Everything in Uncharted is ridiculous; that’s part of its draw. Why just have one gangster when you can have a slew of them? Why just sink a pirate ship when you can dangle it from a helicopter and drop it onto jagged oceanic rocks below? Why just have a missing brother when you can be an orphan, too? Ultimately, I had to stop thinking and let the gold, the fighting, the treasure hunt, the trust issues, the bubblegum, the churches, the ruins, the underwater caves, the above-water caves, the secret nightclubs, the Papa John’s, the nuns, the murder, the sheer spectacle of it all fill my brain, and then let myself laugh at the spectacle. See it. I’ll go with you. I’ll even give you my last stick of bubblegum.

DANA HERRNSTADT B’24 will not get caught.