Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg and Antonio Banderas were to land on Vietnamese screens on March 18. But finally, the cast of the American film Uncharted will not have citizenship in Vietnam. “During the review of the film, the National Board of Rating and Classification discovered that an image of the nine-dash line appeared in the filmjustifies the director of the Department of Vietnamese cinema, Vi Kien Thanh, to the state media Zing. Therefore, this film will be banned from screening.
Does the “nine-dash line” mean anything to you? It is this geographical delimitation specific to China, which is also called the “ox tongue” because of its shape, which defines Beijing’s claims to the waters of the South China Sea. Claims with which Hanoi absolutely does not agree.
Tensions between the two countries crystallize in particular around the Paracels and Spratleys islands, also called Hoang Sa and Truong Sa by the Vietnamese. Which explains why we can read, in the comments of the official Facebook page of the film, messages such as “Hoang Sa Truong Sa belongs to Vietnam!”left by Vietnamese Internet users who have obviously already seen pirated versions ofUncharted.
A Netflix series censored last year
This territorial dispute has already had consequences for other films in the recent past in Vietnam. In the 2018 American romantic comedy, Crazy Rich Asians, a scene was cut in the country, as it showed a map featuring the disputed islands in the South China Sea under Beijing’s control. A year later, Hanoi pulled the DreamWorks animated film from the screens Abominable for the same reason.
Last year, Netflix had to remove the entire Australian series in Vietnam Pine Gap for similar scenes. Two episodes had also been pulled from the platform in the Philippines, again due to the infamous “nine-dash line”. So now it’s the turn ofUncharted to bear the brunt of the curse of “beef tongue” in Vietnam.
Is it so serious? When it was released in France, our critic Marius Chapuis judged the film, an adaptation of a successful video game series, “softie”, “skinny”, “warmed up”. And believed that “in a way, we have rarely seen a more vibrant plea for video games than this first feature film stamped PlayStation Productions”. Vietnamese fans just have to console themselves with their controller, obviously they won’t lose out.