The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Will we embrace the zombies?
The creator of ‘Chernobyl’ takes on the video game curse with ‘The Last of Us’
At the beginning of HBO’s new drama series, The Last of Us, a 1960s scientist announces that, if the Earth heats up by a couple of degrees, parasitic fungi called cordyceps could take control of our brains and turn us all into flesh-chomping zombies. “Billions of puppets with poisoned minds, permanently fixed on one unifying goal: to spread the infection to every human alive by any means necessary.” This already happens today, albeit with ants. Cordyceps have not evolved to survive in a body as warm as a human’s. Yet.
Based on the phenomenally successful 2013 video game of the same name, The Last of Us imagines a devastated world, in 2033, 20 years after such a fungal outbreak has brought civilisation to its knees. Among the survivors are Joel and Ellie (played in the series by Pedro Pascal, from The Mandalorian, and Game of Thrones’s Bella Ramsey), a mismatched pair who must cross an America populated by fascist troops, bloodthirsty bandits and millions upon millions of the fungal-brained “infected”.
As in the video game and its 2020 sequel – which together have sold more than 30million copies – Joel is a gruff Texan loner still grieving the daughter he lost in the initial outbreak, as he attempts to smuggle smart 14-year-old Ellie out of an army-controlled “quarantine zone” because her natural immunity to the fungi may hold the answer to the survival of humanity. Players get to control both characters.
Ensuring that the series sidesteps the video game “curse” – by which any screen adaptation is a stinker (see Mortal Kombat, Tomb Raider, Super Mario Bros, Resident Evil and so on) – are Neil Druckmann, the creator of the games, and Craig Mazin, the screenwriter responsible for Chernobyl, the hard-hitting HBO series about the political and personal ramifications of the 1986 nuclear disaster. One common problem, says Druckmann, is that filmmakers tend to “think because the gameplay makes a game special, you need to put that on screen – but TV and film are passive mediums. You turn something really exciting into something mundane.”
“Video games are violent,” says Mazin. “You kill a gazillion people in video games. But if all we did in the series was continually show our characters killing waves of bad guys, viewers would stop caring. It would become cartoony – you can’t experience violence in ‘real life’ in the same way you can in a game. To anybody adapting a video game, I would strongly recommend beginning by saying: ‘How few acts of violence can we commit? And how can we make them meaningful?’”
He adds: “There was a certain kind of hyperrealism to Chernobyl that we wanted to carry through to The Last of Us. We wanted to keep it dirty, gritty.”
That involved keeping CGI to a minimum: “We’re not Avatar…”
It was Chernobyl that convinced Druckmann (who had previously worked with director Sam Raimi on a failed attempt to turn The Last of Us into a feature film) that Mazin was the best man for the job. “He just got it right,” he says. “And that was dark subject matter to work with.”
Mazin, meanwhile, had been a fan of Druckmann’s games for many years. “The video game curse?” he chuckles. “Yeah, I’m essentially cheating my way around the curse by choosing the game that has the best story and the best relationship in the entire medium.”
Given how attached fans of the games are to the characters of Joel and Ellie – voiced in the game by Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson – are Druckmann and Mazin braced for a backlash? They were insistent that Pascal and Ramsey find their own version of the characters – both actors had minimal interaction with the games beforehand – rather than attempt a facsimile.
“We know our fans are very protective,” says Druckmann, “and we know they’ve been disappointed in the past by adaptations of things they love – embarrassed by them, even. What we’re trying to say to them is: trust us.”
Mazin has faced down early scepticism before, with many viewers initially perturbed by the fact that the characters in Chernobyl spoke in a variety of British accents. He recalls: “When the first episode aired, people were like: ‘Oh, I didn’t realise all the people in the Soviet Union were from f------ Shoreditch!’ But that lasted 15 minutes and then they realised it didn’t matter. People will realise that with The Last of Us, too. You’ll fall in love with this Joel and Ellie, just as you fell in love with the first Joel and Ellie.”
With the potentially devastating impact of viral infections fresh in our minds after the pandemic, the question remains: how worried should we be by cordyceps? “It’s definitely science-fiction,” insists Mazin. “But it is grounded in reality. Everything our scientist says at the beginning of the show is true.” Lock up your mushrooms.
‘You kill a gazillion people in games, but if we did that in the show it’d be cartoony’
‘The Last of Us’ begins on Sky Atlantic on Mon at 2am and 9pm