John Watson looks down at his screen, and we see the message he’s reading on our screen as well. Now, we’re used to seeing extradiegetic text appear on screen with the characters: titles like “Three Years Earlier” or “Lisbon” serve to orient us in a scene. Those titles even can help set the tone of the narrative - think of the snarky humor of the character introduction chyrons on Burn Notice. But this is different: this is capturing the viewer’s screen as part of the narrative itself [1] It’s a remarkably elegant solution from director Paul McGuigan. And it works because we, the viewing audience, have been trained to understand it by the last several years of service-driven, multi-platform, multi-screen applications.

The connection between Sherlock’s intellect and a computer’s becomes more explicit in one of my favorite scenes, later in the episode. Sherlock is called to the scene of the murder from which the episode takes its title.[3] We watch him process the clues from the scene and as he takes them in, that same titling style appears, now employed in a more conventional-seeming expositional mode

But then the shot reverses, and it’s not quite so conventional after all. The titling isn’t just what Sherlock is understanding, it’s what he’s seeing. In the same way that text-message titling can take over our screens because whatever we’re watching TV on is just another screen in a multiplatform computing system, this scene tells us that Sherlock views the whole world through the head-up display of his own genius.

All an “Uncharted” movie had to accomplish — all that it possibly could accomplish — was to capture the glint and derring-do that helped the series port the spirit of Indiana Jones into the modern world. And while it’s true that the best moments of Ruben Fleischer’s thoroughly mediocre (if not unpleasant) adaptation manage to achieve that goal for three or four entire seconds at a time, this generic multiplex adventure falls so far short of its source material because it fails in the areas where history says it should have been able to exceed it. The areas where movies have traditionally had the upper hand over video games: Characters. Personality. Humor. Humanity! You know, the things that films get for free, and video games have to create through witchcraft. The same things that someone up the ladder decided to leave behind when they took a solid-gold brand like “Uncharted” and turned it into an IMAX-sized chunk of cubic zirconia, resulting in a movie that isn’t just less playable than the game on which it’s based, but less watchable too.