The Last of Us: TV finally has the perfect video game adaptation
The Last of Us came out in 2013 on the PlayStation 3 and is considered one of the best video games ever made. I know this because the week it came out I drew the curtains on the front room of my shared house, forbade all of my housemates from entering the zone unless they were going to watch in reverent silence, and completed it.
In the game you play Joel – finally, some Joel representation! – through a post-apocalyptic US, 20 years after a pandemic event. Every human you encounter is trying to stab you or scavenge bullets off you or recruit you to one side of a conflict between the citizen army and the underground uprising. Every monster you meet is infected with a brain fungus that makes them blind, bulbous and very bitey. But what made the game stand out was the story: Joel is escorting Ellie, a fungus-proof teenage girl and humanity’s last hope, across a long trail that will take them both to safety. The classic dynamic – gruff old-timer, chatty teen innocent – softens and deepens as they crawl further into the sprawl of what’s left of the world. I really liked it; a lot of dyedin-the-wool players felt there was too much story. Where’s Sonic! Where’s the infinite ammo machine gun! Where’s the open map with infinite exploration! This sucks!
So HBO has decided to remake it as a TV series (Monday, 9pm, Sky Atlantic), cutting all traces of the video game out of the story, and finally letting those who have an Xbox experience it for themselves. From a distance, this doesn’t make much sense, in a way that, say, adapting a book into a TV series does – you can already see this story happen, if you want to, by playing the game. And culture has a rich history of taking video games and making something somewhere between bad and underwhelming – Mortal Kombat, Tomb Raider, The Angry Birds Movie. For the type of person who shuts their curtains to keep the daylight out so they can better enter the atmosphere of the game they are playing, there is hesitancy with this. But there needn’t be: what the writers (Craig Mazin, from your favourite, Chernobyl, and Neil Druckmann, writer and creative director of the original games) have done is cleverly extended out the world of The Last of Us to tell the stories that can’t be told by pressing R2 and X every couple of seconds.
We should talk about the casting, first. Game of Thrones alumni Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey play Joel and Ellie with perfect lightness of touch. A nine-episode story about two strangers scrabbling through an infested US could quickly become a relentless survive-a-thon without the right performances, and both actors here are excellent. Ramsey – who plays “peskily unflappable” better than anyone else alive – is the levity and the hope, childishly silly in one scene and holding a gun in another. Pascal, too, makes the Joel role his own. I initially thought he might be too impishly gorgeous to play a mid-50s southerner who doesn’t want to be doing any of this shit, but he creaks around in a denim shirt with just the right amount of world-weary heaviness and “your ankle’s twisted, but it isn’t broken” practicality. What the game’s cutscenes did so well was the choreography of drama – glances, touches, half-expressions – and this has been transposed to the show. It spends just the right amount of time showing you everything it shows you, and then: what was that sound?
It’s a bold statement to make this early in the year, but I think episode three of The Last of Us might well be one of the TV episodes of 2023: an hour-and-15-long zig away from Joel and Ellie’s trudge across America, it deftly explores a story starring Nick Offerman’s survivalist Bill that could not have been told to someone who was holding a controller while itching to headshot some monsters. There are nods to gaming throughout – an early car chase is shot from a clever backseat perspective; Joel and Ellie’s first interaction with the Clickers ends with them pulling a bookcase over a doorway to seal off one level to another; Joel keeps finding sniper rifles – but they never get in the way. In fact, without the fail-to-a-checkpoint, every-shot-hits, semi-invulnerable feeling you get playing a game, the zombie (and human) attacks feel more primal, more permanent. Is this the best gameto-screen adaptation ever? Until they inevitably give Candy Crush a gritty reboot, absolutely yes.