The Last of Us

What could the end of the world look like? These days, there’s plenty of apocalyptic scenarios for us to fear; the one featured in director Craig Mazin’s opener for a ten part series for HBO feels both familiar and fresh. Somewhere between John Wyndham and Bioshock, The Last of Us is a survivalist epic, based on the essential Naughty Dog video game, that takes place in a world-gone-made where nature has taken over in the form of a mass fungal infection caused by climate change. Few actors are more ideally cast as a scientist explaining fungal infections in 1968 than John Hannah, and once this prologue is out of the way, we can jump into the main narrative and the enduring relationship between tough cookies Joel and Ellie.

It’s fairly laughable how many critics have lauded The Last of Us as a tv show that effectively dramatizes the game since the 80 minute opening episode barely depicts any scenes from the playable version at all; instead, we get a good half hour with Sarah, (Nico Parker), Joel’s doomed twelve year old daughter. Living in Austin, Texas circa 2003, Sarah spots the harbingers; radio murmurings, low flying military jets, a protective dog looking quizzically at a neighbour’s grandmother before she turns… Sarah secretly repairs her father’s watch for his birthday, stealing his money to do so before confessing; she’s an ‘honest thief’ and ready for the world of hard transactions that she and her dad stand on the edge of as the apocalypse arrives on cue. Players of the game will know why we spend so much time establishing Sarah here; as houses burn and jets fall from the sky, her father simply cannot save her, and he will have to wait 20 years for any kind of redemption.

So as with the game, we jump forward a couple of decades to a sh*tshow 2023 substantially worse than the one we’re living through, Joel, a Desert Storm veteran played by Pablo Pascal, is now a smuggler navigating his way on a transactional basis between militaristic authorities and the Firefly terrorist group; he describes a life of ‘bullets and pills’. In a narrative that always had a little John Wayne about it, from The Searchers to True Grit, Joel agrees to transport Ellie (Bella Ramsey, yes, Mildred Hubble from The Worst Witch) to safety, but there’s plenty of bloaters and clickers lurking in the urban dystopia…

The Last of Us was a somewhat revolutionary game; after childish unlimited lives and ammo fantasies, grim-fest The Last of Us was more about desperately trying to fashion a shiv out of a pair of rusty scissors on the floor of a dingy basement. That hard-scrabble feel was always cinematic, reflected in the Gore Lieberman T shirt sported here, although it’ll be hard to the tv show to reflect the well-balanced view taken of Joel and Ellie’s changing relationship in the game; another game-changer was swapping between the two, not only fighting assailants as Ellie but riding to the rescue as Joel, and then vice versa. With nine episodes to go, there’s plenty of time for this kind of sophistication; for now, co-creators Mazin and Neil Druckman has done a fine job of keeping the personal and emotional stakes high and the action tight and intense.

‘They got a kid,’ Joel’s brother says as he sees a bedraggled family by the side of the road ,’So do we, keep driving…’ replies Joel; one of the elements that made The Last of Us so effective was the sense of responsibility and empathy that it created in players, and The Last of Us sets out its stall correctly with a focus on how Joel and Elie might just learn from each other, even if they’re the last people on earth. While Pascal and Ramsey don’t look facially like the video-game characters of The Last of Us, they’re ideal choices for a rare tv show with attitude and punch that looks set to win over players and non-players alike. So grab a rucksack, a shiv and hold your nerve; The Last of Us looks like a winning adventure for us all.