‘Uncharted’ Territory: What It Took to Pull Off the Harrowing Plane Sequence

thewrap.com:

“Uncharted” is upon us.The video game adaptation, which just had an impressive debut weekend (with Sony brass already describing the film as “a new hit movie franchise”), stars Tom Holland as adventurer Nathan Drake and Mark Wahlberg as his older mentor/fellow adventurer Victor “Sully” Sullivan.

Together, they are hunting for hidden treasure and lost pirate ships – you know, the usual. The movie is filled with oversized action set pieces, and the biggest, most memorable scene of the bunch involves Holland’s Drake getting ejected from an airplane and jumping from one netted cargo container to the next, all of them still tethered to the plane and blowing in the wind.It’s a moment that captures the movie’s roots (the film is based on a series of successful video games published by Naughty Dog for the PlayStation system of consoles) while also offering a thrilling, cinematic centerpiece all of its own. (Even if you haven’t seen it, much of the marketing behind the movie uses this moment extensively.) It’s also a scene so important that the movie opens with this scene, then goes back in and fills in a bunch of the story, and then comes back to it.TheWrap spoke with several key members of the production about how the sequence came together, what technology it took to pull off (robotic arms!), and where the inspiration came from.

The origins of the sequence can be traced back to 2011, when Naughty Dog released “Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception.” That game featured a very similar sequence.

Drake hops aboard a large cargo plane, gets found out, is ejected with the cargo, and must jump from one pallet to the next.