I'm not the likely audience for the post-apocalyptic HBO series, "The Last of Us." I'm extremely wary these days of post-apocalyptic horror media, and only made it through the first season of "The Walking Dead" before calling it quits. "The Last of Us" is based on a highly regarded 2013 video game, with a fervent fanbase. Famously, much of the game was motion-captured and voice-acted by professional actors, many of them now returning to cameo or play different roles in the new series. Video and computer games have been notoriously difficult to translate to screen, with titles like "Assassin's Creed" and "Uncharted" among the latest failed attempts. "The Last of Us" series, however, succeeds by being a very faithful adaptation of very strong material.
"The Last of Us" is zombie media, though the culprit is technically a cordyceps fungus that evolves to be able to infect humans, take over their brains, and turn them into mindless, undead extensions of itself. The first episode follows our main character Joel (Pedro Pascal) in the chaos of the initial outbreak, and then twenty years later, where he's eking out a sad existence as a smuggler with Tess (Anna Torv), his partner in crime. The government has turned fascist and is constantly fighting a rebel organization, the Fireflies. Joel and Tess work out of a quarantined zone in Boston, where they encounter a Firefly leader, Marlene (Merle Dandridge), who needs them to help transport a 14 year-old girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsay) out of danger. Ellie is immune to the cordyceps and may be the key to a cure.
As with all stories of this type, "The Last of Us" is less about the monsters and more about how humans behave in these conditions. The show was created by Neil Druckmann, the original writer of "The Last of Us" game, and Craig Mazin who created "Chernobyl," and they do a good job of expanding on the game's story. With nine episodes to fill, the show has time for extended flashbacks and side stories to show us how others are surviving in this dystopia. The episode that has attracted the most attention features a couple (Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman) who ironically find a better life together after civilization falls apart than they had when everything was still intact. There are also the typical run-ins with cult leaders, scavengers, and different types of communities that have formed in the twenty years since the cordyceps took over.
Despite a fourteen year-old being one of the main characters, strong content warnings are in effect. There's plenty of violence, including the non-graphic execution of a child in the premiere, and Ellie curses like a sailor. This is a very dark universe, where the surviving humans are regularly committing worse atrocities than the zombies, including some of our heroes. Major deaths are not only possible, but pretty much a given, with nearly every episode ending in someone's demise. One of the major themes is how the heartwarming father-daughter bond that develops between Joel and Ellie inspires Joel to do some truly heinous things out of love. The visceral frights here have nothing on the existential horror of watching people's humanity erode throughout the show.
Because it's HBO, the production quality is excellent. Fans of the game will enjoy seeing some favorite sequences recreated, and the cordyceps monsters brought to horrifically tactile, fungalicious life. However, the real upgrade is the caliber of the acting talent. Pedro Pascal has felt a little overexposed lately, but he's making an excellent case for being our go-to everyman as Joel. And Bella Ramsay is the exact right combination of annoying kid and burgeoning badass. The supporting cast is also wildly overqualified, with great work from Torv, Offerman, Murray, Melanie Lynskey, Scott Shepherd, and many more.
I put off watching the show for a while, for a myriad of reasons, but once the good notices started rolling in, I knew I'd see it eventually. "The Last of Us" is familiar territory, and the kind of series that could have been done very poorly. However, I knew that with the right talent and the right approach, it was also a show that had the potential to be the first great game adaptation. And I think the jury's still out on that, but it's certainly one of the best ones to date. Here's hoping season two can live up to what we've seen so far.
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