Uncharted’s production had to build most of a boat to film the movie’s massive final act

polygon.com:

Unchartedsends its heroes all over the world. But even after a few brushes with death in Spain, Nathan Drake’s most harrowing adventure in the movie takes place on a boat… sort of. The movie’s climactic third-act chase takes place somewhere pretty unlikely, and to pulling it off wasn’t all CGI trickery.

In a Zoom interview with Polygon, Uncharted director Ruben Fleischer revealed how his team made the movie’s last act happen, and how they tried to make a ridiculous situation feel as real as possible.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Uncharted.]

Uncharted’s final act sends Nate, Sully, Braddock, and the movie’s army of villainous henchmen to a remote cave in the Philippines where they discover the remains of two of Ferdinand Magellan’s ships. To get them out of the cave, Braddock decides to pick each ship up with its own helicopter and fly them out, with Nate, Sully, and plenty of bad guys on board. And that’s when the flying pirate ship battle starts.

“When I read the script I was completely blown away,” Fleischer told Polygon. “You know, pirates, the film franchise, was a definite kind of tonal reference for our movie. And that sense of adventure and all those pirate ship battles. [...] We’ve all seen a million pirate ship battles, but we’ve never seen one in midair.”

Of course, the Uncharted video game series has always included its big and absurd set piece — including the falling train that opens the second game, or the mid-air chase that opens both Uncharted 3 and the movie.

“I think the fact that it’s a video game adaptation gave us the license to kind of heighten the reality a little bit,” said Fleischer, but he stressed that this didn’t mean they could abandon reality completely. “We wanted it to at