A nine episode adaptation of the post apocalyptic zombie video game The Last of Us came out to critical acclaim earlier this year, with both fans of the game and newcomers falling in love with it. I kind of missed the zeitgeist on this, mainly due to neither me or my friend having the channel it was showing on, and also, being unable to find a decent way to illegally stream it. Fear not, for I eventually decided to buy it on DVD, so most of it was watched in a legal fashion, even if we were a little late to the party.
Twenty years in the past, a worldwide apocalyptic event occurred that resulted in the near complete break down of law and order. A fungus mutated to have the ability to infect humans, able to turn them into zombie like puppets who exist only to pass on the fungus to new hosts. The resulting outbreak was near impossible to control, and now the land is split up between small communities, often ruled with an iron fist, and smaller sporadic groups of bandits. Joel (Pedro Pascal - The Mandalorian TV show) is a man with a tragic past who had gone down a dark path in the name of survival in this new harsh world. Him and his partner, Tess (Anna Torv) are hired by the leader of a revolutionary terrorist group known as The Fireflies, to escort a very important package across the wasteland of America. This package turns out to be a teenage girl, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), someone who is special due to being immune to infection from the zombie like creatures. Joel and Tess are instructed to deliver her to a medical facility, where it is hoped a vaccine can be created from the girl's blood. Initially hostile and resentful of his task, as the weeks and months pass, Joel and Ellie slowly begin to bond, with it beginning to seem to the two that each other are exactly what they have been searching for.
I had heard that whether you were a fan of the games or someone who hadn't even heard of them, that this would be a special show. I would disagree in part due to how closely this follows the events of the game. From the very beginning I knew exactly what was going to happen, this sucked out a lot of the joy of discovery for me, as I knew instantly whenever a character was introduced what their fate was going to be. It meant the stakes were always low and there really wasn't much surprise to be found. I found both the first episode 'When You're Lost in the Darkness' and second episode 'Infected' to be really quite dull, I found it hard to separate this from my memory of the game. Thankfully it was third episode 'Long, Long Time' that really changed up the format. While the show never returned to such a big divergence, this still really stuck with me. In the game you encounter a character called Bill, who has set up a whole load of traps around the gated community he lives in. In the TV show, instead of this, the whole third episode takes place as a flashback. Over twenty years it shows the emergence of a loving relationship between Bill (Nick Offerman - Parks and Recreation TV show), and Frank (Murray Bartlett), which was just so beautiful and bittersweet to see play out. In the world of The Last of Us life rarely goes well for people, so it was sorrowful knowing where things would eventually lead up to. Despite Offerman only appearing in this one episode, he was perhaps my second favourite character of the whole first season.
The show is at its best when it is digging deeper into stories of the characters rather than just aping the events of the game. Two parter, 'Please Hold to My Hand' and 'Endure and Survive' was a prime example. In the game this was just another encounter with an evil group, but the show gives far more exploration of just who they were, making for a very interesting story. The DLC for the video game, Left Behind is fitted in here, and worked just as well as it did there. This did lead to a similar complaint I had with the game. Due to the road trip feel of this, often there can be weeks or months having passed between episodes. It can create a bit of a disjointed feel, and affected things such as Joel and Ellie's relationship which didn't get strong until the later half of the season, so didn't have too much screen time to really be demonstrated. It all culminates with 'Look for the Light', a decent season finale that was let down by feeling a little bit rushed in places.
The game has plenty of zombies, the show not so much. My younger self would have balked at this, but with the focus here on the humans I actually didn't mind the absence of much infected. Typically there are only one or two zombies in an episode, a handful of times a decent amount make an appearance. They looked suitably messed up, and the clickers in particular were a highlight. It was the human antagonists who left more of an impression, such as a late appearance of Scott Shepherd (El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie) who played the religious commune leader David to chilling effect in penultimate episode 'When We Are in Need'. Best character of course was Joel, Pascal can just do no wrong, and the conflicted and complicated character is really brought to life by him. Despite him having done some truly terrible things, he is someone who was a amazing to follow. Initially I wasn't taken with the shows interpretation of Ellie. In the show she feels a lot more bloodthirsty and angry than in the game, while initially I found Ramsey's different look to be off putting. By the end though she did grow on me a lot, especially with the more light hearted scenes around her and Joel.
The Last of Us was a fantastic season, impressive casting choices, and also impressive how many of the locations looked identical to their video game counterparts. If not for being so familiar due to my many playthroughs of the game, I would have liked this even more, but even knowing all the story beats, I still found myself loving this. I really hope season two doesn't follow the bleak path of The Last of Us: Part II, though I am pretty certain it will do.
SCORE:
No comments:
Post a Comment