The Last of Us HBO

Pedro Pascal brings Joel to life in "The Last of Us," HBO's adaptation of the beloved, critically acclaimed video game. Liane Hentscher/HBO.

“The Last of Us” doesn’t necessarily reinvent the post-apocalyptic genre, but “The Walking Dead,” this is not. Oh, and sensitive viewers, beware – “The Last of Us” can be deeply sad. [ “Mandalorian,”](https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/30/media/the-mandalorian-season-2-disney-star-wars/index.html) “Narcos,” “Game of Thrones”) as Joel and breakthrough performer Bella Ramsey (also of “Game of Thrones,” “Catherine Called Birdy”) as Ellie. Joel and Ellie are still our protagonists, and most of the series is dedicated to their relationship (albeit with some attacks by fungus-monster-people interspersed). That might rattle “The Last of Us” players used to destroying fungus-faced monsters between cutscenes, though there are still scares. [“The Last of Us”](https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/10/entertainment/the-last-of-us-review/index.html) is now widely recognized as one of the best video games of all time. [bleak “Chernobyl” miniseries](https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/22/entertainment/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes-review/index.html). (In its original 2013 interview, IGN called their rapport “one of the great highlights” of the game.) He’s an often relentless smuggler with a deep-buried paternal side; she’s a parentless teen with the mouth of a sailor and a dangerous secret. From its heart-wrenching story to its celebrated cast, here’s why fans of the game and prospective new viewers can’t wait to watch “The Last of Us” when it debuts Sunday night. What’s so unpredictable about “The Last of Us” is how deftly it balances engaging gameplay with compelling, often heartbreaking storytelling. [ “The Walking Dead”](https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/21/entertainment/the-walking-dead-series-finale/index.html) had concluded its third season, [“World War Z”](https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/21/showbiz/celebrity-news-gossip/world-war-z-review-ew/index.html) was expected to be a summer blockbuster and “Resident Evil” was still perhaps the best-known zombie-starring video game. But “The Last of Us” also always prioritized the relationship between Joel and Ellie.

Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey lead HBO's adaptation of video game "The Last of Us," which breaks the curse of bad video game TV shows and movies.

Like a cut scene in a video game, the story sometimes meanders away from Joel and Ellie's journey west and focuses on other slices of humanity surviving in the wake of the end of the world, and these vignettes are what really makes "Us" compelling. More than anything else, "Us" feels designed not to offend those gamers who love the original so much, down to a massive super-zombie showing up in one episode who feels straight out of a "boss fight" in the game. "Us" is likely to face endless comparisons to "Walking Dead," given the latter's one-time status as the show-of-the-moment, but "Us" feels visually distinct from that series, which was all boring blood and guts and Georgia backwoods. Starring "Game of Thrones" alums Pedro Pascal and [Bella Ramsey](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/10/07/bella-ramsey-interview-catherine-called-birdy-movie/8205305001/), it brings the visceral, intimate quality of a video game without feeling like you're stuck in an uncanny valley playing one. It's clear, even for someone who has never played a single minute of "Us" on a PlayStation, that there's something special about the story, and that Mazin has done a thoughtful job bringing it to life. film, which plays like a bad "Saturday Night Live" sketch (an upcoming Mario film, featuring [Chris Pratt voicing the titular plumber](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2021/09/23/chris-pratt-voice-super-mario-movie/5836924001/), has already been maligned online before its release).

Here's a sentence that I never thought I'd type: The Last of Us airs its first episode tonight on HBO and HBO Max. It's a surreal feeling.

Neil, Craig and the production team took this opportunity to weave in new characters, themes, and locations — only where they felt true to the characters and the world, the “soul” of The Last of Us. As you can imagine, I’m extremely excited (and extremely nervous) for PlayStation and Naughty Dog fans to dive into the first episode and experience for themselves the love the cast and crew has poured into this adaptation. I can’t wait for the world to experience their portrayals and the rest of these unforgettable characters in an entirely new way.

The Last of Us is an engaging, occasionally magnificent video game adaptation. The post-apocalyptic drama premieres Sunday, January 15 on HBO.

Whether or not that’s actually what Mazin and Druckmann have planned for The Last of Us remains to be seen, but as far as video game adaptations go, it seems safe to say that the HBO series is already off to a very promising start. The original Last of Us has, of course, long been regarded by many as the best narrative video game that’s ever been made, so it’s easy to see why Mazin and Druckmann have chosen to honor it so deeply. As is the case in the original Last of Us games, the HBO series’ best scenes often aren’t any of its various action set pieces — some of which inevitably feel very video game-y — but rather the conversations that Ellie and Joel share over campfires or in the darkened rooms of abandoned skyscrapers. Several of the show’s Mazin-penned episodes are also the ones in which The Last of Us diverges the most from its source material. Over the course of its first 9 episodes, The Last of Us follows Joel and Ellie as they survive a series of losses and hardships that only bring them closer together. That’s where the real strength of both 2013’s The Last of Us and its TV adaptation lies. If there is one overarching criticism to be made of The Last of Us’ first season, it’s that the show never feels quite as visually atmospheric or inventive as it should. As those who have played The Last of Us will likely be the first to tell you, its story is not necessarily groundbreaking. After all, if a TV show is going to simply recreate many of the scenes, lines of dialogue, and even music cues found in its source material, as The Last of Us does, then what’s the point in even making it? Fortunately, HBO’s The Last of Us adds enough to its source material’s story to ultimately justify its existence. On the one hand, it’s undeniably refreshing to see a video game adaptation that is genuinely confident in the strength of its source material. [The Last of Us](https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/hbos-the-last-of-us-trailer/) is the most faithful video game adaptation that has ever been produced.

HBO's super-sized series premiere saw Joel (Pedro Pascal) navigate trauma and find new purpose in Ellie (Bella Ramsey), plus some video-game callbacks.

People don’t love that sequence because it’s two minutes of CGI forming different shapes; they love it because it’s two minutes of CGI telling a story of sorts by establishing the geography of the series as a whole and of individual episodes, changing periodically to introduce new spots on the map or prepare us to return to little-visited places like The Pyke. While the idea of the spores rising into something resembling a city — i.e., a metaphor for how the world as we know it has been consumed by the mushrooms — is clever, it’s still ultimately just a bunch of shapes, and not interesting enough to go on for as long as it does. And we discover that Marlene needs Ellie to get to her other Fireflies out west because Ellie is somehow immune to the infection. Ellie is not as in command of the situation as Tess was, but we also quickly see that she is not afraid of being shackled to a wall by armed people who won’t explain why they want her. Then purpose arrives in the form of Ellie, a girl close in age to Sarah who needs passage out of the city. He is emotionally closed-off and efficiently brutal, and when his new charge Ellie is threatened by a soldier late in the episode, he has a PTSD flashback to Sarah’s death and turns absolutely savage in the way he beats on this man. [zombies](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/zombies/), though we do get the disgusting imagery of a dead body absorbed into a wall of fungus when Joel and the others traverse an underground tunnel late in the hour. (We are introduced to her surrounded by armed men after a beating, yet it is clear that she is in command of the room the entire time, and would likely have found a way out of her predicament even if a conveniently-timed Firefly bomb hadn’t given her an escape route.) He is existing rather than living, haunted by the loss of his daughter even more than the loss of everything else he knew, with few goals beyond getting through the next day. Before we get to that violent escape from Boston, we first have to establish the state of America 20 years after the zombie uprising. So I’ll be discussing this episode, and all the ones to come, solely on the basis of how it works as a television show. But before that, we have to watch civilization fall in the way it tends to in so many dystopian shows and movies. Instead, creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are using those scenes to establish emotional stakes for Joel, and to make us deeply feel at least some of the pain he experiences when Sarah is shot by a panicked soldier on the night the world is wrecked.

The Last of Us TV show on HBO is full of Easter eggs and nods to fans of the franchise — everything from weapons to dialogue pulled straight out of the ...

The page it opens to is easy to miss, but may be a nod to the franchise — The Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road.” This could be reference to the long, winding road that will take Ellie and Joel across the United States, or maybe the long and winding road it’s been since a The Last of Us But there’s one scene in particular that stood out for its similarities to an iconic level in The Last of Us Part 1: Chapter 3, “The Outskirts.” Crawling through tunnels and debris, the trio has to dodge spotlights and flashlights from the military guarding the quarantine zone wall — spots in the game where it’s essential to play the game as stealthily as possible. Merle Dandridge plays Marlene in The Last of Us Part 1 and The Last of Us Part 2, taking the role on a third time for the HBO adaptation. Our best guess is that this is a nod to the video game — in The Last of Us Part 1 and The Last of Us Part 2, you get max three hits on your everyday melee weapons. Joel asks if Ellie is a “bigwig’s daughter” or something, and Ellie responds that it’s “something like that.” These few lines are pulled straight from the game, but in those scenes it’s Tess talking to Ellie when they’re escaping the zone. The phrase is graffiti on walls throughout Boston (and likely elsewhere), a symbol and motto for the revolutionary group the Fireflies — the people who are fighting the oppressive military in the country’s quarantine zones. For dedicated fans of the game, the appeal of The Last of Us is not necessarily in being [surprised by twists and turns of the story](https://www.polygon.com/e/23314304); rather, it’s to [see the franchise in a new light](https://www.polygon.com/e/23316913), picking out the little details that point back to the original media. The heavy wrench looks to be of forearm’s length and probably quite handy while they’re escaping the city, but Joel drops it right away. This scene sets up the horrors of the infected in a different way, giving some more context to show viewers what’s going on. There’s no real significance for the band in the game, other than a few posters, but the back of the T-shirt does foreshadow how the game plays out: Each tour stop is another location that Ellie and Joel will visit throughout their journey. In the video game, you control Sarah, and she’s looking through her house in the dark. It’s all in the third-person view, with the camera in the back seat.

Series creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann and star Pedro Pascal discuss the changes made to a game-changing sequence in the live-action drama.

They are tasked by the Fireflies rebel group to smuggle Ellie out of the city to their allies on the outside. Parker was placed in the back with cinematographer Ksenia Sereda, who strapped in with her camera and a helmet to capture the action. Druckmann recalls toying with a number of story ideas for how to get Joel out of the house to line up these solo scenes with Sarah to the events of the game. Commanded by his superiors over the walkie to kill the suspected infected, the armed guard opens fire, causing Joel and Sarah to tumble down the hill. A gunshot cuts through the air to stop a rampaging infected host from chowing down on Joel and Sarah. Pascal confirms the sequence that follows in the car was just as crazy to film as it looked on screen. Sarah wakes up for the second time on the night of Joel's birthday and finds herself alone. Sarah ignores it as the bell rings and she heads to a watch repairman to get Joel's gift ready with cash she stole from his drawer. After making a birthday breakfast of scrambled eggs for Joel (played on the show by The Mandalorian's The series begins with a day in the life of Sarah Miller, played by actress Nico Parker. Joel, a single father, is on the phone in the background. "Well, we can't do that in a television show," Mazin notes, "but what we can do is give you more moments with her alone."

It's too soon to say whether HBO's big-budget video game adaptation will become a zombie classic. But it delivers one heck of an opening catastrophe.

So as I write about the show, I will be focusing on how it works as a television series, and not on how well it does or does not adapt the game. With a well-thumbed volume of “The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits” by his side, he waits to hear specific songs that signal whether it’s safe to venture beyond the Q.Z. Besides, I believe this show is a work of fiction, given that we don’t live in a 2023 where half the population has been taken over by fungi. [Bella Ramsey](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/11/arts/television/bella-ramsey-the-last-of-us.html)), a feisty 14-year-old who is the only known person to survive an infection — and, hence, could be the key to saving humanity. (In 2023, they are called “FEDRA,” for the Federal Disaster Response Agency.) And he smuggles drugs with his business and romantic partner, Tess (played by the magnificent Anna Torv, beloved of science-fiction/fantasy/horror fans from her days on “Fringe”). Set in 1968, the prologue features a TV interview with a scientist who explains that his greatest fear isn’t a “global pandemic” (a term that, in a moment of dark humor from Mazin and Druckmann, is defined by another guest for the blissfully ignorant ’60s audience) but rather a mind-controlling fungus that could one day thrive on a warming planet, turning humans into fiends. Beyond establishing the miserable conditions of 2023, Mazin and Druckmann must introduce the show’s other leading character: Ellie ( (“They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”) Or think of the 2004 remake of Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” or the first episode of “The Walking Dead,” both of which begin as the heroes wake up in a nightmarish world that collapsed while they were asleep. But I’ll say this for the series’s creators, Craig Mazin (the Emmy-winning writer and producer of “Chernobyl”) and Neil Druckmann (a creator of the video game): They do deliver one heck of an opening catastrophe. We see during the escape that Joel is willing to ignore other people’s suffering, or even to inflict harm wantonly, in order to protect himself and his family. And we discover that the government’s response to this crisis can be as destructive as the crisis itself. Most of the Texas scenes are from Sarah’s point of view, too, although there are sly hints throughout that something bigger is happening.

Pedro Pascal is Joel<p> Game of Thrones/The Mandalorian's Pedro Pascal stars. 20 Images. Bella Ramsey as Ellie<p> Game of Thrones' Bella Ramsey plays Ellie ...

Though the trailers have given us a glimpse that much of the premise will follow along with the original game, chances are there are going to be a lot of shake ups along the way. In the The Last of Us: American Dreams prequel comic, we see that Ellie and her friend Riley were captured by the Fireflies, and the latter worked hard to join the group only to die after being infected through a bite. The Last of Us is based in a post-apocalyptic world where a mutation of the cordyceps fungus broke out and decimated the population. In the beginning, the Fireflies not only wanted to end FEDRA’s violent rule and return to a more democratic form of government, they were also a primary group actively searching for a cure. One major teaser dropped in The Last of Us trailers has been the introduction of the Fireflies, a major rebellious faction in the games that just about every character is tied to in some way or another. After the 2011 release of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us game, it didn’t take long for the concept to dip its toe in the world of the multimedia franchise.