HBO’s ‘The Last Of Us’ Review

This is a mostly spoiler-free review. I’ll post weekly spoiler-filled reviews of The Last Of Us each Sunday here on this blog.

HBO’s The Last Of Us is a beautiful production with a terrifying premise: A mysterious cordyceps fungus has begun to spread, infecting humans across the globe and turning them into—for all intents and purposes—zombies. But these are not the shuffling, easily-dispatched zombies of The Walking Dead. They run. They fling themselves through windows and over countertops. They screech and wail as they lunge for their prey. The show begins—after a brief scene set in the 1960s—at the outset of this terrifying pandemic, but jumps ahead 20 more years in the first episode, which is when the real story kicks off—in 2023, as it happens. Ten years after the release of the game.

The story focuses primarily on two characters: Joel and Ellie, the protagonists of Naughty Dog’s PlayStation hit, setting forth on a desperate quest that neither particularly wants to be on or fully understands.

Pedro Pascal plays Joel, a rugged and world-weary survivor mired in his tragic past. His fellow Game Of Thrones alumni, Bella Ramsey, is 14-year-old Ellie—a girl with plenty of spunk and a dangerous secret. The two are thrust together in what becomes a road-trip across America, and a fight for survival against terrible odds. Pascal and Ramsey are both terrific here. I can’t imagine better casting for either character. The casting across the board is excellent.

One thing I’ll be curious to discuss as we watch this show together over the coming weeks is the nature of adaptation.

There’s a scene in the opening minutes of HBO’s new drama that’s taken straight out of the video game. Three survivors in a truck are making a quick escape from their suburban Austin, TX neighborhood and we see a road sign. Turn left to head into Austin. Turn right and you’ll be on the road to San Antonio. It’s not significant in any meaningful way, but having just played the opening hours of the remastered PS5 version of The Last Of Us, I noticed it immediately. The shot in the show is identical to the game. You might not be able to tell them apart at a glance.

There are other moments like that, but mostly HBO’s adaptation of the video game takes its own way down a familiar road. Obviously, changes have to be made in an adaptation from one medium to another, whether book to film or game to TV series, and here each change feels both purposeful and faithful to the source material, even when going well beyond what we played in the game.

Fortunately, where it strays it does so sensibly, adding new characters or new layers to characters in ways that help flesh out the story. All that video game stuff has to be replaced with TV stuff, after all.

That means expanding the stories of a number of more minor characters as well, including Tess (Anna Torv), Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett). And from these stories we learn more about the world as it falls apart. We also get glimpses into the big picture and the murky origins of the global cordyceps pandemic, as well as into the lives and hopes and heartaches of the survivors who remain among the living.

Three other powerful pieces of The Last Of Us are plucked directly from the game. First, the scenery. The apocalyptic landscape from the game—toppled skyscrapers overgrown with vines and fungus; a grey cement world gone to green—creates a strikingly distinct setting. And that setting shifts—from city to forest to small town, flooded hotels to overgrown museums. There are hints of HBO’s other post-apocalyptic masterpiece here—Station Eleven—though I suppose the zombies make it a little less poetic. The sameness that defined The Walking Dead for so many years is, blessedly, avoided.

Then there is the music. Gustavo Santaolalla’s haunting guitar score drifts in and out, through the cobwebs and windows, over and under everything. Music—like scent—has a way of drawing us back in time, and the moment those strings are plucked I’m back in 2013, playing The Last Of Us for the very first time. It remains one of the most distinct and memorable video game scores I’ve ever heard, and it translates beautifully to TV. It’s remarkable how well it works in the opening credits, almost as if it were written for an HBO show in the first place.

And finally, there is the horror of it all. The terrifying clickers only able to discover their prey through sound. The hordes of zombies, all existing in what is effectively a fungal hive-mind. Of course, it’s the living who pose the greatest threat to Joel and Ellie.

Do I miss actually playing the game while I watch the show? Sure, of course. There’s something about being a part of the story that a TV show simply can’t replicate. But TV has its own strengths, and showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have done a remarkable job adapting the game to screen.

I had high hopes for The Last Of Us and I’m happy that I haven’t been—so far, at least. I haven’t watched all nine episodes yet, so there’s always the possibility that this show goes downhill or off the rails down the road. If it does, I’ll write about it in my weekly episodic reviews. So far, my biggest complaint is that the series premiere runs a bit too long.

I’m choosing to (mostly) watch the series alongside viewers rather than rush through my screeners all at once. It feels more natural. I made this mistake with House Of The Dragon, binging as much of it as I had access to—and then discovering that the show was simply better week-to-week rather than all at once. So I’ll be reviewing and recapping (with spoilers and more in-depth discussion) each episode as they air beginning this Sunday, January 15th and running through Sunday, March 12th. I’ll be very curious to hear what all of you think of it as well. Tune back in Sunday for our discussion of the series premiere!

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