From Indiana Jones to Uncharted Here’s the Problem With Adventure Movies

From Indiana Jones to Uncharted, Here’s the Problem With Adventure Movies

Often based on no historical facts, adventure stories like Indiana Jones and Uncharted tend to struggle with the same problems over and over again.

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From Indiana Jones to Uncharted Here’s the Problem With Adventure Movies

WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Uncharted, now playing in theaters.

Adventure movies have been around almost since the dawn of cinema, depicting characters in fantastical situations that brought many to the big screen to experience these thrills. Yet, from Indiana Jones to Uncharted, Hollywood has been feeding audiences stories that lack historical accuracy and sadly mirror the way history has treated its true treasures.

Back in the 1980s, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan came up with a new type of hero, loosely inspired by pop culture movies, television series and Disneyland rides, but no real archeologists. Yet, most likely unintentionally, Indiana Jones became the figure that represented how a true adventurer archeologist should be. Although many things in the Indiana Jones films are based on real locations and stories, the filmmakers took many nonfactual storyline liberties. Raiders of the Lost Ark became the most profitable movie of 1981, and it defined the adventure movies that followed. But they became trapped in the same structures found in history.

Indiana Jones, The Mummy, Tomb Raider and now Uncharted tell a similar story, that of white people traveling to territories populated by non-white people to explore and steal their treasures, but usually hidden under a plot of good against evil. When looking into history, many foreign artifacts were brought to imperialist European nations solely in terms of their relevance to European history. The justification was often that, in the name of science and preservation, they were rescuing the artifacts of ancient, glorious civilizations from careless locals, studying them, putting them on display in museums and educating the world.

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Nowadays, the narrative is in reverse. Museums have begun to return these treasures to their respective nations. But, as Uncharted proves, Hollywood hasn’t caught up yet. One could argue that Uncharted is simply an entertaining movie based on a popular video game that deals with the same narrative as its namesake. But in truth, the movie adaptation is dealing with more profound themes. Nathan, played by Tom Holland, and his brother Sam, played by Rudy Pankow, proudly believe that they’re descendants of famous explorer Francis Drake. But Drake was not just an explorer; he was also a cunning politician, a privateer and a slave trader. And it was he who second matched the circumnavigation of the world, whose first expedition, led by Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan and Spanish Juan Sebastián Elkano, is the center of the Uncharted movie’s plot.

However, unlike in the movie, Magellan’s expedition was never about a golden treasure. Magellan’s expedition was about power, the power of owning the oceans’ traveling possibilities and controlling the spice trade. Spices, at the time, were the modern-day equivalent of the greatest of treasures. Of course, in the movie, Magellan’s expedition is downplayed as a mere search for gold. The film claims the treasure was lost somewhere in the Philippines, and every character in Uncharted sets off to find and retrieve it for themselves despite having no claim to it.

In these many stories where nothing is done for the sake of historical accuracy, perhaps it would be a good time to reverse some of the genre’s paradigms and start listening to the changes that are happening in the world. Give audiences actual facts backed up by research, even if mixed with fantasy. The adventure genre does not need to lose its charm, but it could do with some updating.

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Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/indiana-jones-uncharted-adventure-movie-colonialism-problem-explained/

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