The Last of Us is a ‘remarkable’ show
Live-action video game adaptations are hardly renowned for being serious works of art. At best, the last decade has produced well-crafted family fare, such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu; at worst, the genre has found itself defined by a string of cynical mediocrities and unwatchable failures. The challenge tends to be two-fold. Video games themselves – while capable of telling compelling stories on their own terms – do not translate naturally to movies and TV shows; while the people in charge of financing or making those movies and TV shows have been known to have little respect for what makes them worth adapting in the first place. Neither of which is the case for HBO’s remarkable nine-part adaptation of The Last of Us, generally regarded as one of the greatest video game stories ever told.
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Originally released in 2013, The Last of Us is set amidst the ravages of a post-apocalyptic US, 20 years after a parasitic fungus called Cordyceps has turned most of the population into mindless monsters. It follows a hardened smuggler named Joel, played in the show by Pedro Pascal, who has been tasked with escorting across the country Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a teenage girl with an apparent rare immunity to the infection. In an interview with The New Yorker, creator Neil Druckmann recalled how, in 2014, a film adaptation fell through because executives wanted to make it bigger and “sexier”, like the Brad Pitt film World War Z. The game, however, offers a more intimate story. It is a character study of astonishing depth, offering around 15 hours of gameplay. It burns dark, violent, slow; thick with an atmosphere of melancholy and dread; heavily influenced by the aesthetics of prestige television and cinema. Druckmann himself has referenced the Coen Brothers film No Country for Old Men as a touchstone.
It is an essence that has been captured deftly in this small-screen iteration by both Druckmann and co-showrunner Craig Mazin, the writer behind the similarly dark and atmospheric 2019 HBO drama Chernobyl. It is a faithful adaptation in everything from look to score to feel, with the early episodes in particular following the game almost beat-for-beat. We meet loving father Joel on the day of the outbreak, as he desperately tries to keep his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) safe from a chaotic, crumbling Texas. The infected are fast and rabid at first, but cut to 20 years later and the Cordyceps has spread from the brain to all over the body, creating an array of monstrosities. The most terrifying of which are Clickers, whose fungi-covered eyes mean that they possess super-sensitive hearing. The way they screech, the way they jerk, the way they force you to stay absolutely still, is a horror to behold.
It is around this time that we’re reintroduced to an older, more grizzled Joel, changed by the things he has had to do to survive. He works as a smuggler (food, ammunition, drugs) in a Quarantine Zone in Boston, where life is tough, resources are scarce and the remnants of the government – now run by FEDRA (Federal Disaster Response Agency), heavily based on real US government agency FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) – rule with an iron fist. Pascal is not as rugged as video game Joel, but his performance is raw and haunted. He is a man hollowed out by grief, who has buried his humanity and cheer beneath mounds of cynicism and violence. But Pascal is also a sensitive, soulful actor, and seeing Joel soften and thaw throughout the series is one of its great pleasures.
The reason for this change is Ellie, who Joel must deliver to a group called the Fireflies – a revolutionary militia fighting to bring down FEDRA and restore democracy – in the hope that they can use her immunity to develop a vaccine. The show essentially lives or dies on the casting of Ellie, who is as playful and profane as she is endearingly obnoxious. Thankfully Bella Ramsey, best known for her brief turn as Lyanna Mormont in Game of Thrones, steals every scene she is in. Her Ellie is a loveable little terror, full of charisma and bravado, serving as the perfect foil to Pascal’s stoicism. There’s a real wit and warmth to the writing too, as Ellie gradually breaks down Joel’s defences with her favourite book of bad puns. “Can I ask you a serious question?” she whispers in the dark, as both of them try to sleep in the woods, “why did the scarecrow get an award?”
The humour is much needed in the bleak, violent world that they traverse, where people are just as dangerous as the infected. The video game, which is split into four seasons across a year, is episodic in nature, with most locations featuring a sub-plot sketched out in letters and mementos that the player finds. The show builds upon these letters and fleshes them out into fully-formed stories. And it is here, when Druckmann and Mazin are at their most audacious in terms of creative licence, that The Last of Us truly sings as television.
Episode three, for example, turns a series of bitter letters between two men called Bill and Frank (implied to be lovers) into the most tender of romances. Set across two decades, it follows paranoid prepper Bill (Nick Offerman) as he strikes up a relationship with Frank (The White Lotus’ Murray Bartlett), a man who stumbles into one of his many traps. What follows is a beautiful, exquisitely performed exploration of The Last of Us’ central theme: that the ashes of the world are enough, as long as there is someone to live for amongst them.
It is a sentiment that is turned inside-out in episodes four and five, which follow Joel and Ellie as they make their way through the aftermath of a bloody uprising against an especially fascistic branch of FEDRA in Kansas City. The superb Melanie Lynskey (Yellowjackets) features here as the chillingly violent and vengeful leader of the revolution. She wants all collaborators executed, with a special emphasis on a man called Henry (Lamar Johnson), who murdered her brother. These episodes also feature some of the show’s best action sequences, including a huge set-piece involving the infected that is as grisly and gripping as any in the game.
It is not a perfect adaptation. There are certain scenes early on that feel too gamey for television (such as those where Joel and Ellie are sneaking around a museum), while the latter half of the series feels like it needs one more episode to even out the pace (scenes involving the infected are strangely scarce beyond episode five). There is also the fact that no on-screen adaptation of The Last of Us will ever truly capture what makes the source material so interesting: to be immersed in that world, to luxuriate in spaces that feel haunted by absence, to be eaten alive by a Clicker.
And yet, it doesn’t feel even remotely controversial to call this the best video game adaptation ever made. For fans of the game, it is an adaptation of the utmost skill and reverence, yet one still capable of surprise; for people who have never picked up a controller, it is an encapsulation of the game’s heart and soul – its full-blooded characters, its neat plotting, its mature themes of love and loss. It is, to finish Ellie’s joke, “outstanding in its field”.
★★★★☆
The Last of Us premieres on 15 January on HBO in the US and 16 January on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK
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