The Last of Us TV series brings a video game hit to life: review

The Last of Us brims with scare-you-to-death moments and visually-rich set pieces.

Nick Offerman in The Last of Us

‘Once you get into the world of dystopia, it’s hard to avoid plagiarism, because other people have had such powerful ­visions,” the novelist Anthony Horowitz once suggested.

The Last of Us is the latest post-apocalyptic action drama, with all the obligatory horror motifs cunningly woven into a complex narrative. While many of the ideas are familiar, it’s a work of some vision and cinematic accomplishment. This is understandable given the show is among the most expensive ever made. It is an astonishing spectacle from HBO. Each of the nine episodes reportedly cost more than $US10m ($14m).

The series is based on the 2013 video game of the same title. It is written and created by the visionary Neil Druckmann. The game went on to sell about 20 million copies for Sony’s PlayStation consoles and led to a hit sequel. It seems that for many gamers, it’s still regarded as one of the greatest games ever produced, creatively bringing the quality of prestige TV to gaming.

The Last of Us is generically described as “a survival/action game” and it takes place 20 years after a pandemic wipes out most of the world’s population. The Infected are bloodthirsty, zombie-like beasts, and society as we know it has collapsed. Joel, a hardened, violent, emotionally stunted survivor, finds himself tasked with smuggling Ellie, a 14-year-old girl, who may be carrying the secret to immunity, across the country. Of course, they aren’t the only ones trying to survive through desperate times.

Unlike many successful video games The Last of Us was acclaimed for the way it relied so heavily on a central, highly developed character study — almost like a novel in its detail and emotional complexity. How far will a person go to survive and protect those they love?

“It may trade in despair, selfishness, and misery, but it’s also quick to lightly breathe on the embers of hope, redemption, and love that glow within its darkness,” one enthusiastic reviewer wrote. Others joked, half seriously, it was, “Cormac McCarthy with a joystick”.

It was hardly new as a concept. The Walking Dead TV series had already brought zombies to a new audience: people who were fascinated by the undead, yes, but who were also intrigued by the convoluted emotional twists and bends of the show’s multiple storylines. The show sparked many serious debates about viruses and disease. It raised theological questions and engaged in a continuous discussion about human dignity, our fears of death and desecration, our need or not for some sort of transcendent reality, and the importance of community.

And it was not only The Walking Dead. Post-apocalyptic stories were almost commonplace at the time – and still are – but fans were consumed by the emotion the narrative generated and its range of human connections.

The HBO series, the latest in TV’s so far failed attempts to adapt video games to high-end drama, comes from Druckmann, who wrote the video game, and the accomplished Craig Mazin, both of whom are executive producers on the drama and also are its main writers. They are also involved in the direction of episodes, which follow Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey as Joel and Ellie, the hard-nosed smuggler and the teenager who may be the key to creating a vaccine after modern civilisation has been destroyed.

Music is from Academy Award-winning Gustavo Santaolalla, who also scored the game. This time he joins David Fleming. Santaolalla won the Academy Awards for best original score in two consecutive years for Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Babel (2006) and composed the theme music for Jane the Virgin and also Netflix’s hit true crime series Making a Murderer. And his music is a delicious, evocative part of the HBO series.

Mazin created Chernobyl for HBO with an awesome attention to historical accuracy and ­detail, engineered as a grim, immersive thriller, bringing back that harrowing event with frightening clarity and a superbly orchestrated sense of danger and dread. Mazin’s show earned 19 Emmy nominations and won 10, including outstanding limited series.

And while he loved The Last Of Us as a game, the director never believed he would be ­involved with a TV adaptation, even though he was sure one existed in the material.

Mazin somehow organised to talk with Druckmann about a possible project and says their meeting left him “levitating”, though he remained conscious of the genre’s terrible history – many called it a curse – when it came to adaptations. When, at a later meeting, Druckmann expressed confidence that the show “will be the best, most authentic game adaptation,” Mazin said: “That’s not the highest bar in the world.”

As they wrote the series they used some dialogue from the game but also moved the story through time in a way the game didn’t, opening it out, they told the New Yorker’s Alex Barasch, and treating violence more empathetically. “Watching a person die, I think, ought to be much different than watching pixels die,” Mazin says.

And he suggests the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic underscored the need for a generally more realistic approach to calamity and tragedy. “If the world ends, everybody imagines that we all become the Road Warrior,” Mazin says. “We do not. Nobody’s wearing those spiked leather clothes. People actually attempt, as best they can, to find what they used to have amid the insanity of their new condition.”

The first episode, “When You’re Lost in the Darkness” — a reference to graffiti seen a number of times as the episode unfolds, which finishes “Look for the light” — starts in 1968.

An urbane scientist (John Hannah) is a guest on a TV talk show, dryly disdaining the notion of a viral pandemic. He is more concerned with the threat of fungal disease. “There are some fungi that seek not to kill but to control; viruses can make us very ill but fungi can alter our very minds.”

He then describes the ophiocordyceps unilateralis infection in ants and the way, as the earth becomes warmer, fungi could take control of billions of humans to some revulsion in the studio.

We cut to 2003 and we follow the teenage Sarah (Nico Parker) as she celebrates her father Joel’s (Pedro Pascal) birthday somewhere in Austin, Texas. They’re battlers; Joel works in construction and his brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) is locked up for getting into a fight requiring Joel to bail him.

Then all hell suddenly breaks loose: cop cars fill the neighbourhood, jets in the sky, car alarms blaring and their neighbours suddenly infected killers. Is this a mass event of near simultaneous infection?

They escape in Joel’s truck but after they crash are confronted by a panicked soldier who shoots Sarah. It’s the event that will motivate nearly all of what happens later.

Cut to 20 years in the future. The cordyceps fungus plague has destroyed much of the world, snatching the bodies of millions with their tendrils. Joel is surviving in an oppressively militarised quarantine zone, helping to incinerate bodies.

It’s run by FEDRA (Federal Disaster Response Agency), controlling the remaining human settlements with a militaristic iron fist. Anyone with signs of disease is quickly eliminated and there are mass hangings on many street corners.

Joel is also working with Tess (Anna Torv), smuggling drugs and cigarettes in from outside, as he is still haunted by the death of his daughter. He’s approached by Marlene (Merle Dandridge), leader of the resistance group called the Fireflies, to smuggle 14-year-old Ellie (Bella Ramsay), who is somehow seemingly immune, out of quarantine and convey her to their contacts on the outside. Their escape will not be easy because their route is a combat zone.

This episode is superbly directed by Mazin, establishing the central characters and doing what writers call “the table-setting” for the series: establishing themes and emotional subtext. An excellent action mechanic, he’s capable of hitting us viscerally, as he did in Chernobyl, with what the critic Stephen Hunter calls “the is-ness, the there-ness” of the experience, especially Joel’s pain and trauma, but mainly remains cool and composed as the many technicians under his control take charge.

The acting, too, is wonderfully convincing. Pascal has a broken gallantry about him, a sense of loss that rarely leaves his tough face; and Ramsay is fascinating to watch. Her Ellie is a lovely contradictory mix of innocence and street smarts, resilience and bad temper. Torv, such a good performer, is excellent as Tess, the hard-bitten smuggler who seems to have a fondness for Joel, though it’s begrudgingly reciprocated.

I came fresh to the series never having played the game, and it is an enthralling portrayal of human behaviour in dire situations — this show can certainly do the most extravagant scare-you-to-death moments, and Mazin is a master of visually rich set pieces. It’s going to be a thrilling journey with Joel and Ellie, driven by that resounding piece of graffiti: “When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light.”

The Last of Us is streaming on Binge.