“It means something brand new, never before seen, hasn’t been put on a map yet,” says Mark Wahlberg to his co-star Tom Holland in a promo clip explaining the title of their new movie, Uncharted. “And that’s what this movie is,” Holland agrees. Well … even without seeing Uncharted, we all know that’s not quite true. For one thing, it is adapted from a popular video game series, but also, let’s admit, in movie terms, this territory is actually pretty well charted. The treasure-hunt movie is now a genre, usually involving a couple of adventurers thrown into a globe-trotting quest for a highly valuable artefact, pursued by dangerous rivals, hostile natives and so on.
This terrain has been mapped over the past 40 years by the likes of Indiana Jones, Romancing the Stone, The Mummy, National Treasure, Tomb Raider, the other Tomb Raider. Just last summer we had Disney’s Jungle Cruise – with Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt questing up the Amazon.
