‘Last of Us’ focused on regular people in post-apocalyptic tale
Based on the video game of the same name, HBO’s “The Last of Us” is a post-apocalyptic story about a population that has been decimated by a pandemic. The culprit is a parasitic fungus that turns people into zombies, spreading the sickness and its long, fibrous mutations with just a bite.
Life is either dreary, precarious and haphazard in urban militarized zones, or people are making do on their own in rural pockets of the United States. Society has collapsed, and it’s every person for themself.
Amid all this uncertainty, a grizzled smuggler (Pedro Pascal) is tasked with looking after a mouthy 14-year-old girl (Bella Ramsey) and transporting her across the country to a research lab. She’s immune to the fungus and might be the key to developing a cure or a vaccine or something.
It’s all very “The Walking Dead” meets “Station Eleven” — two shows with devoted followings, and HBO is hoping to capture some of that magic here. I’ve never played the game, so I’ll leave discussion of the adaptation’s merits to those who have.
Above all, TV is about entertainment. But speculations about the future always reflect present-day anxieties. What if things become much worse than they already are — what then? How does one survive this sort of thing? What is the psychological fallout? What becomes of the last of us?
I’m not sure I find these musings, interspersed between action and violence, as meaningful or emotionally complex as some audiences do. “The
Last of Us” is well-made and mostly absorbing, anchored by solid performances from Pascal and Ramsey, both alumni of “Game of Thrones.”
Maybe I’m more interested in the practicalities of starting over and adapting to a radically new normal. There’s a community the pair stumble across that has more or less figured things out. But the story told in “The Last of Us” — from the game’s writer Neil Druckmann and “Chernobyl” creator Craig Mazin — isn’t especially curious or interested in lingering in this place long enough to suss out the details. There’s another remote community, this one struggling, that’s cultlike in its turn to religious fervor, clinging to the hope that there’s some kind of explanation, some kind of order, to this suffering. It’s an empty promise, built on desperation and violence.
The primary relationship and where it’s headed, between Pascal’s Joel — a man haunted by grief and numb to any new possibility for human connection — and Ramsey’s Ellie — an orphan who has never known a parent’s love and has toughened herself to that reality — is telegraphed early on. A
stoic man sees his heart grow three sizes thanks to a spunky kid he reluctantly learns to care for as if she were his own. It’s a trope that Hollywood returns to often, and maybe that’s part of what left me somewhat cold to the premise.
But I like that “The Last of Us” isn’t consumed with telling stories about the powerful, but instead is focused on regular people who are just trying to make it through this mess. There’s an all-toobrief but terrific scene featuring an aging Native couple played by Elaine Miles and Graham Greene, and I would have loved to have stayed longer with this droll pair, who aren’t alarmed so much as amused by the unexpected, very intense and not terribly friendly arrival of Joel and Ellie at their cabin.
But death comes for everyone, and it’s not always by way of the fungus. That seems like a worthwhile thing to remember as well: Even if you outrun the zombies, death will get you in the end, one way or another.
So what is life up until that point? “The Last of Us” offers a glimpse.
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