The opening episode that sets up the zombie apocalypse scenario is well executed and did draw me in, in large part because of the excellent performances by Pedro Pascal and Nico Parker. However, the second episode is when the video game element really came through. It felt to me like three players - the show’s protagonists - wandering through a video game world deciding which rooms to enter and then just going on a zombie rampage in each of them.
It’s hard to imagine how this sort of narrative structure will build to become a rich, complex and compelling story. But the series is created by Craig Mazin (and Neil Druckmann), responsible for the excellent limited series Chernobyl and is one of the hosts of the Scriptnotes podcast, which, as they say every episode, is “a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters”. I have listened to Mazin dish out storytelling advice for years and I trust that he knows what he’s doing with The Last of Us, even if it doesn’t appeal to me.
The internet commentary from fans of this show is made up primarily of people posting side-by-side videos of scenes from the series next to the same scene from the game. They’re remarkably similar in both aesthetic and dialogue and I assume that’s what has the audience gushing. They’re primarily purists, on high alert for any divergence from the source material that might contaminate their love of the game.
One thing The Last of Us does very well is set up real terror in the viewer about the potential for a human-destroying fungus and that will likely keep me awake at night for weeks. That and my preoccupation with the zombie module at drama school are my main takeaways from the show. There’s such a classic zombie physicality, and The Last of Us doesn’t stray from it much, that it must be covered somewhere between Stanislavsky and Shakespeare. Greg suggested they’re likely professional dancers and he’s probably right but it’s more fun imagining aspiring actors in Zombie Technique 101, taking turns to stumble across the room on the outside edges of their feet, arms flailing, necks strained, jaw contorting while their teacher implores them to be the zombie.
HE SAW
The Last of Us is almost certainly the most successful and critically lauded series based on a zombie apocalypse video game. At the time of writing it has a 100 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and rave reviews from all sorts of otherwise-credible reviewers.
I watched the near-movie-length first episode unsure what the fuss was about. It was a fairly standard opening to an apocalypse story: we follow a child going about her happy, everyday life as things around her get weirder and weirder and weirder until, eventually, she’s watching her elderly neighbour bent over on the floor eating someone’s abdomen.
From there, there’s the inevitable desperate attempt to escape the hellscape and there’s a jump forward in time to the apocalyptic future in which mushroom-headed zombies have taken over and the human protagonists are trying to get a car and there’s a sassy kid who might be the key to the future if only they can keep her alive long enough.
I didn’t know what all the fuss was about. It was compelling enough in an action-adventure, will-they-get-away-or-won’t-they sense, but that’s not a difficult or particularly interesting trick to pull off. I probably wouldn’t have continued watching except that Zanna told me one of her favourite podcasts described the first episode as “all setup”.
But the second episode, which was also mostly setup, left me even more puzzled. It’s effectively an extended suspense scene in which three characters are on a scary journey through a zombie-infested part of Boston. The sustaining force for the viewer is: are they about to be attacked by zombies? As far as it goes, the show does a good job of keeping us watching, but by the end of episode two you’re left wondering why there’s not more meat on the bones.
This show exists primarily because of the video game on which it is based, which will deliver a built-in audience of millions and which was apparently so successful in part because it was seen as a thinking person’s zombie-shooter. But no matter how thoughtful the game might have been, this is yet another big-budget show derived from the idea that original entertainment is too risky. A zombie apocalypse is bad, but a world in which we’re all slowly made to believe that expensive remakes of brain-dead entertainments are the best we have – that’s truly terrifying.
The Last of Us is now streaming on Neon.
