The resemblance of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us to a prestige TV or film drama has been the object of both praise and derision since its release in 2013. The game’s prioritization of its characters’ antiheroic arcs—rendered through meticulously staged motion capture—along with its episodic structure and on-rails story progression, made it possible to either laud its narrative ambition or accuse it of aspiring to be something more than a game.
Thus, some kind of adaptation to a non-interactive medium, overseen by Neil Druckmann, the game’s writer and creative director, seemed inevitable, and HBO’s The Last of Us series proves that the terms of such a debate may be false. Co-created by Druckmann and Craig Mazin (Chernobyl), this eminently faithful adaptation, despite some powerful performances, is evidence that The Last of Us is ultimately just great as a game, as the parts of it that most resemble a prestige drama grow thin when the gameplay is extracted.
In its broad outline, The Last of Us treads ground that already felt familiar in 2013. Joel (Pedro Pascal), a hardened middle-aged smuggler eking out a life in post-apocalyptic America, reluctantly agrees to escort a teenaged ward, Ellie (Bella Ramsay), across the zombie- and wacko-infested country to a safe location in exchange for supplies. Twenty years after the zombie apocalypse began, Ellie is the world’s new hope, the first person to anyone’s knowledge who’s resistant to the fungal Cordyceps brain infection that caused the zombie outbreak. Old contacts of Joel’s in the Boston quarantine zone contract him to deliver Ellie to the Fireflies, a partisan group looking to overthrow fascist military rule and rebuild a democratic society.
Initially treating Ellie with the same gruff cynicism with which he greets the rest of the world, and dismissive of the hope that others see in her, Joel gradually warms to her, even caring for her as a surrogate daughter. In the second episode of the season, after the initial job to hand Ellie over to the Fireflies on the outskirts of Boston goes belly-up, he resolves to help her find her way to a medical facility in Utah. The journey there becomes a tour of the various mini-dystopias that have sprung up in the two decades since society collapsed.
The show’s production design takes many cues from the game, but the result is environments that can feel too manicured—the overgrowth on abandoned cars a bit too carefully placed, the moss in a patch of sunlight streaming through a collapsed roof too neatly lit, and the moments that pause on such sights a bit contrived in their attempt to aestheticize decay. The same details that can be so immersive in the game become mere window dressing for the apocalypse here.
On the other hand, Pascal and Ramsay succeed in breathing new life into their characters. The first episode opens with a prologue set at the outbreak of the apocalypse, in which Joel loses his daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker). The series then flashes forward two decades, and while Pascal doesn’t quite read as a fiftysomething man, he compellingly wears the weight of two decades in his troubled but soft-featured face. For her part, Ramsay imbues the 14-year-old Ellie with a nuanced combination of grown-up disillusionment and childlike naveté that lends this The Last of Us a sense of pathos even when it’s missing most of its other marks.
Many stretches of the game that staged memorable battles with hordes of zombies—like Elie and Joel’s run-in with Joel’s smuggling contact, Bill (Nick Offerman), outside of Boston—are reconceptualized in the terms of prestige television. Episode three abruptly cuts away from the early stages of Joel and Ellie’s journey to give us a depiction of the apocalypse as it’s been experienced by Bill, a “prepper” living alone in his idyllic and now heavily fortified burgh, even finding love in Frank (Murray Bartlett), a refugee who got caught in one of his traps. Thanks to Bartlett’s insistent charm and Offerman’s unmatched ability to make libertarian weirdos likeable, the episode’s focus on ancillary characters proves to be a highlight.
Elsewhere, The Last of Us relies far too much on material taken directly from the game, as if merely stripping back the stealth and combat elements of gameplay were sufficient to adapt it for television. The result is a series that not only often runs like a compilation of extended versions of the game’s cutscenes, but is also almost assertively middlebrow. There’s a general shirking away from horror tropes like atmospheric tension and explicit evisceration, for one thing, that renders a story about ravenous monsters rather toothless.
Take the fifth episode, in which Joel and Ellie confront a cult of personality led by would-be authoritarian Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey) in Kansas City. Kathleen and her henchpeople feel like also-rans from your run-of-the-mill dystopia, and a final conflagration that brings them and Joel and Ellie face to face with a plethora of rampaging zombies—including one of the game’s most menacing foes—lacks the horrific release of tension it should convey, perhaps because the episode has done so little to build the undead up as objects of real dread.
The underwhelming confrontations with the zombies may be one crucial aspect of why this adaptation fails to accomplish the dramatic heights that the game did. The first two episodes of the series begin with explanatory prefaces that have little impact, narratively or emotionally, on what follows. And the more that the characters explain and conjecture, the less substantive the creators’ ostensibly clever rewrite of the zombie apocalypse seems. On the other hand, the series dedicates relatively little effort to truly frightening the viewer, as if being scared were somehow less important to the story than laying out its capital-T themes.
The experience of being frightened—of darkness, dismemberment, death, and decay—should, of course, be a major facet of this story. Without this visceral experiential quality, the series becomes a Spielbergian parable about familial crisis amid apocalyptic disaster—a late episode recreates the game’s homage to Jurassic Park’s morning-in-the-treetops sequence—that lacks Spielberg’s ability to make suspense, wonder, and sentiment truly feed into each other.
As The Last of Us progresses through its brutal take on the archetypical hero’s journey, its insistently grimdark vision of human nature appears more and more to be a fashionable faade. Ellie’s confrontation with David (Scott Shepherd), the leader of a cannibalistic cult, in the eighth episode provides a pair of suspenseful scenes and a showcase for Ramsay, but as it plays out here, the plotline’s trajectory is too clearly telegraphed from the outset, and the way that Shepherd’s duplicitous villain serves as a foil for Joel’s caring paternalism is too plainly laid out. In the end, by stripping out the gameplay from a vivid genre game that’s fleshed out by cinematic and televisual tropes, the series ends up as mostly just the latter: all flesh, no bones.
Image/Sound
The 4K UHD presentation of The Last of Us is practically beyond reproach. For a show where darkness is in abundance, the murkiness of some scenes feels deliberate in ways that it didn’t when these episodes aired on HBO and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, given the more revealing shadow delineation. Fine details are terrific, with the daytime exterior sequences especially benefiting from the presentation’s high dynamic range. The Dolby Atmos surround mix is consistently clean and well-balanced, intimate where it needs to be and expansive in its employment of all channels when the characters are being put through the ringer.
Extras
While this release boasts over two hours of bonus content, much of that runtime is taken up by odds and ends that fans of the show are no doubt familiar with, including the “Inside the Episode” clip that accompanied each episode on HBO and actor and podcast host Troy Baker’s debriefs. New to the set are three featurettes—“Controllers Down: Adapting The Last of Us,” “From Levels to Live Action,” and “The Last of Us: Stranger Than Fiction”—that celebrate the show’s grotesque realism but mostly feel pro forma. Which is to say, don’t expect any intel about some of the bumps in the production, such as director Kantemir Balagov’s departure from the project due to creative differences and how much of his work actually made it to air.
Overall
The first season of The Last of Us gets an image/sound presentation that’s practically beyond reproach but the extras on this set are pro forma.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
