A Measured Critique of HBO's "The Last of Us"

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The Last of Us is rightfully considered to be one of the greatest video games ever created, and is probably the most consistently cited example when arguing for video games as an art form, so it was only a matter of time before someone saw the potential in a movie or TV adaptation. Everything seemed to be falling in place, HBO and Craig Mazin, and even the game’s original writer and director Neil Druckmann was coming on board. But after watching all 9 episodes of the first season, I have to say, I feel let down. I’m not here to complain about the quote un-quote “woke agenda”, because seriously, grow up. I’m not here to talk about performances which I think were great, or the effects, or things like cinematography, because I think the show mostly excels in any technical sense, but I think that falls apart as a basic adaptation of the game and mishandles some of its most important themes. If you loved it, I’m not here to try and ruin that for you, I’ve been keeping an eye on this adaptation ever since it was first announced and I wanted to love it as much as anyone. But I truly believe that there are some deep issues with the series and I felt compelled to share my thoughts. To start, the story was never really about the infected or even the end of the world, it was always about Joel and Ellie. Everything else that happens in the story, all of the apocalyptic world-building, and even the supporting characters are all there to serve this relationship. And it’s clear that the show understands this, we have some truly beautiful moments between these two characters, but I don’t think it was nearly enough. Just look at the numbers, the game takes about 20 hours to complete, even more if you explore everything or play on a harder difficulty setting, and you are strapped into Joel’s POV for that entire time, with obvious exception to the Winter sequence or the very beginning of the game. That’s twenty hours to see these characters interact, to watch as they slowly become more comfortable with each other, as they start to trust each other, and eventually will do anything for each other. But in this 9 episode season, we don’t get all that much time with Joel and Ellie on screen together. Two episodes are almost entirely flashbacks, the opening episode doesn’t see them meet until the very end, and even in the other six episodes where they actually interact, half of that screen-time is given to other supporting characters or extended cold-opens. I get that they wanted to expand the world and tell more stories than what we see in the game, and I love that idea in theory, but not when it comes at the expense of Joel and Ellie’s story. They chose to have 9 episodes when they could have done more, they chose to tell the story of the first game in one season when they could have spread it across multiple seasons, and if they were going to keep it all so short then they at least should have kept the focus tighter on Joel and Ellie, anything to give this relationship more time, it’s the beating heart of the entire game and I feel like it deserved more time on the show. Because Joel is a broken man at the start of their journey, who only grows to care for Ellie after traveling thousands of miles, saving each other’s lives countless times and going through absolute hell together, fighting everything from infected to FEDRA soldiers to raiders and even cannibals. This is a man who has been completely frozen in his trauma, like his watch, he’s still stuck in that one moment, and he isn’t exactly eager to open himself up to that kind of pain again. We see early on that Ellie reminds him of Sarah, a subtle look at his watch instills this, but he spends the next several hours of their journey fighting against this feeling. She’s cargo, plain and simple, he barely even acknowledges her until Tess dies. It isn’t until after hours and hours of following alongside their journey every step of the way that we see him start to wear down ever so slightly, through these small moments. The game gives us so many moments like these that slowly bring them closer together, and the reason that this is so important is because for Joel, opening himself up is the hardest thing he’s ever had to do. He’s awakening a part of himself he thought was lost forever, the part that he tried to keep buried for twenty years, and like thawing out from the cold, regaining that feeling is painful, excruciating even, but I feel like it all just happened too fast on the show, where they go from complete strangers to living and dying for each other after a couple of hours on screen together. I know it would be difficult to compete with the game in this sense, but TV is where you’re supposed to be able to take your time in telling a story, and I truly believe this relationship needed more of it to grow organically. I think that’s even why they made some crucial changes to many characters and scenes, like a key moment with Bill. In the game, he’s reinforcing exactly what Joel fears. "Once upon a time, I had somebody that I cared about, and in this world that sort of shit’s good for one thing. Getting ya killed.” In the show the sentiment is the exact opposite, where Bill tells Joel about he was just as broken, and it was finding someone worth saving and worth protecting, that gave him a renewed purpose. “That’s why men like you and me are here, we have a job to do, and god help any motherf*ckers who stand in our way.” It’s clarifying to Joel, not so subtly, that he needs to protect Ellie, because the show is essentially doing a speedrun of the game, this is already a third of the way through the season and we’ve had maybe an hour of Joel and Ellie together, so for the rest of the plot to work, especially in the endgame, they needed to make sure their relationship was moving along nicely, but it just sort of feels like they cheated it to me. We get many of the same major plot points that develop their relationship, but we lose so much of the emotional connective tissue between those moments that they don’t carry a fraction of the weight that we see in the game, and it’s why scenes like this were changed to make it all easier for the audience, but in the process they just take out all of the subtlety and complexity. One of my favorite scenes from the game is played almost verbatim in the show, but it falls apart because of another scene with Joel and Tommy, as he explains his fears. “You think I can still handle things, but I’m not who I was. I’m weak.” “You want me to take her.” “I’m just gonna get her killed, I know it, I know it. I have to leave her.” But when you compare this to the game, we see something quite different. Joel tries to get Tommy to take Ellie the rest of the way, laying on the guilt for all the years that he looked after him. “I got nothing but nightmares from those years.” “You survived because of me!” “It wasn’t worth it.” Instead of this emotionally vulnerable scene for Joel, it turns into an argument that reveals why Tommy and Joel haven’t talked for years. Why Joel was only willing to seek him out when he needed to, Tommy hasn’t exactly forgiven Joel for all of the things he put them through, and here we’re shown again what Joel values, survival above all else. And it takes Ellie confronting Joel to show him that truth. “I’m not her you know.” “What?” “Maria told me about Sarah.” “Ellie! You are treading on some mighty thin ice here.” This scene is all about Joel still being paralyzed by the fear of getting too close to someone, and it’s in this moment that Ellie makes him realize that he’s being selfish, intentionally distancing himself from Ellie for his protection, not hers. “So don’t tell me I’d be safer with someone else, because the truth is I would just be more scared.” And it’s why this accusation cuts so deep for him, he’s still not ready to admit this truth to himself let alone to anyone else, he’s still fighting like hell to keep himself closed off. But in the show, Joel is entirely aware of his feelings, openly discussing them at length with Tommy and quick to show his affection for Ellie. “Do you give a shit about me or not?” “Of course I do.” “Then what are you so afraid of?” But all of this means that the entire point of this original scene is lost in the translation. Because what this scene is really doing is showing us that he puts his own feelings above Ellie’s. This eventual instinct to protect her might seem virtuous, but it’s really coming from a place of self preservation, and that notion is vital to the ending of the series. So this scene that reveals Joel’s inherent selfishness becomes a scene that paints him as a flawed guardian who wishes for her protection above all else, even if it’s no longer him that’s doing the protecting. It is just fundamentally not the same scene anymore, even though much of it is a word for word adaptation, and this same thing ends up happening a lot on the show for similar reasons. Where these seemingly small changes in character snowball into massive problems for the story. But before we properly talk about the ending, we need to go back and discuss the game and what made it so special. Action games and shooters are probably the single most popular genre of video game to ever exist, but Naughty Dog used this formula to help tell a story that was a meditation on the nature of violence. As Nathan Drake, we kill more people than Dahmer and Gacy combined within every 5 minutes of gameplay but it’s never treated as anything other than normal. In The Last of Us, the gameplay and the story intertwine, this indiscriminate killing is at the core of Joel’s character and ties in to one the story’s most important themes. These aren’t just random mobs to fuel the fun gameplay, these are real people, and we become complicit in that violence just by picking up the controller, this is one of the few games to confront us with the harsh reality of what violence actually looks like. Not just in the literal visual sense and all of the horror that comes with it, but how violence just leads to more violence and it spreads like a disease even more contagious than the cordyceps. And the game doesn’t shy away from the man that Joel has become. The first thing we do in the game is track down someone named Robert, kill a few dozen of his men to get to him and try and beat some information out of him, breaking his arm before he confesses that he sold the guns we’re looking for, so Tess kills him. I don’t think the show needed to mimic this exactly, I agree with the showrunners that the focus absolutely should be more on the characters than on the action, but this kind of action is not just a relic of the gameplay that needed to be abandoned by the show, action and violence are completely interwoven into these characters, and this change directly effects how we perceive Joel. In the show, there is no confrontation between Joel and Robert, he’s killed offscreen by the Fireflies. The first real act of violence we see Joel commit comes later in the first episode, as he, Tess, and Ellie are trying to escape the QZ. This scene comes directly from the game but they made a few key changes. After Ellie stabs the soldier when he tries to scan her, in the game, Tess and Joel take immediate action and kill both soldiers without hesitation, whereas in the show, Joel actively tries to defuse the situation. Hands help up high, pleading with the soldier to let them go, when they cut back to the night Sarah was killed, mirroring the shot so perfectly that this FEDRA soldier might as well be the same soldier who murdered his daughter, and in a fit of blind rage he beats him to death, but seems appalled at his behavior. And Ellie, who in the game is shocked by the violence, seems almost fascinated by it here. The “violent side” of Ellie that they’re foreshadowing. “Then he commits this terrible act of violence in front of Ellie and she’s not shocked, she’s activated. There’s something about the two of these people, they share this thing.” But a few things fall apart because of this scene, the audience no longer sees Joel as a man who has become desensitized to violence, we see a man who uses it as a last resort. But that is just not the character of Joel, and as we dig into later episodes you’ll see why this is such a major issue, but it’s also setting up Ellie like she was destined for this path because she has a violent heart. “You have a violent heart, I should know. I’ve always had a violent heart.” When the game instead reinforces the idea that Joel has imprinted this behavior onto Ellie. She is frequently shocked by Joel’s brutality throughout the game, in the cutscenes and even in the gameplay itself. It’s only after traveling together on such a long journey, leaving so many bodies in their wake that she too begins to show that brutality, and I feel like the show misses this main point. In the game, we start off playing a fun shooter where we just want to kill things, and then we’re given a young companion that we have to protect. In most games this invites some of the most frustrating game mechanics ever created, but here we find that Ellie can fend for herself, especially after she’s proven herself enough to earn a gun. The relationship we develop with Ellie as our in-game companion mirrors the relationship she builds with Joel. We both start out worrying that she’ll be a nuisance like in most other escort missions, a helpless NPC we have to constantly babysit, but she proves herself useful to us, and then we start to warm up to her until we’re eventually grateful to have her around. This idea is reflected multiple times throughout their journey, where she constantly seeks Joel’s praise. “You did good back there, I figured you should know.” “I won’t let you down with this.” It’s rooting their relationship and their bond to survival itself. For Joel, there’s obviously something much deeper happening on an emotional level. But for Ellie, she’s learning to associate all of this violence with validation. Their bond is built through killing infected, killing people, and their relationship deepens the more blood they shed together. Ellie fears ending up alone most of all, and Joel fears true human connection, so she learns to become a valuable asset to him until he sees the utility in keeping her around, and eventually can’t help but start caring for her. The game does this by constantly shifting between these intense moments of violence, reinforcing just how much they both need each other out in this world and then contrasting that action with these quiet moments of humanity, where they can just share a moment of levity, and you need both for this story to work. We do see a few great moments in the latter category, the joke book at the end of Episode 4 is a notable highlight, but hopefully I’ve already argued why I think we should have had more of these moments too, but where they really fall short is that other crucial piece of the equation. I know the showrunners were worried about desensitizing us to the violence too early, they wanted it to carry the impact that it needed in important scenes. But I feel like almost every other flagship HBO series, from Band of Brothers to Game of Thrones, always found ways to pack the emotional punch that any scene needed, regardless of how much violence we had already been saturated with. It’s all about the emotional context, some violence can just fade into the background, maybe it can even feel cathartic, but if it was a character we cared about, or a scene that was meant to be gruesome, they always found a way to make it work on that emotional level. I think if anything, the concern comes from wanting to make Joel more likable. In a game we’re used to killing hundreds of random people, but they were concerned that a TV audience wouldn’t be able to empathize with that kind of character. Because frankly there is absolutely no precedent for audiences rooting for a killer. People just can’t stand morally grey characters or anti-heroes, and we’d never sit through a movie, let alone a multi-season TV show with a character like that as the lead. In all seriousness I just can’t wrap my head around this mentality, they already cast the most likable actor on the planet except for arguably Keanu Reeves, I don’t think it would take much for people to still empathize with Joel even if they showed him in the same light as in the game. If anything I find it a little insulting that they assumed gamers 10 years ago could handle more complex stuff than an adult audience watching HBO today. Especially considering they still decided to go for the same ending. But I don’t feel like this ending, or most of the significant moments in the show feel properly earned at all, even when they’re lifted directly from the game. Because they lose too much of the emotional context, and they make too many changes in the characters for these scenes to work in the same way. The show begins softening Joel right from the beginning, he obviously still has his violent side, so does everyone in this world, but instead of looking for the guy who took his guns and beating him and breaking his arm and watching Tess execute him, he’s doing everything he can to find his brother Tommy. Instead of killing the guards without hesitation, he desperately pleads with him, he does the same thing again when faced with the sniper who was taking shots at them. I know they weren’t trying to make an action show, but the thing is The Last of Us was never just an action game, it took all of the genre conventions of the third person shooter and directly intertwined those mechanics with the story. The emotion and the action go hand in hand. We become accustomed to Joel’s violence without reticence and then it turns that apathy against us, to keep us mindlessly killing until the final moments where we want to do anything but, and it forces us to take that action because this was always how it was going to end. We’ve seen Joel do too much to stop now, but when Joel has been pacified for most of the season, it feels completely out of character in the show. There’s a reason that a lot of the people who were unfamiliar with the game have been complaining about the final episode, only for people online to pile on saying some variation of “hey moron that’s the game ending too so take it up with Naughty Dog” but have we learned nothing from the final season of Game of Thrones? The problem that most had was not the ideas themselves, but that everything felt rushed, and its worst moments felt completely out of line for the characters we had come to know. When you cut out all of the emotional connective tissue, when you cut out so much time for motivations to properly build, for characters to organically change, these same plot beats don’t necessarily work anymore. I’m not inherently against making him more sensitive or vulnerable than what we saw before, but after making so many changes that turn him into a drastically different character, pushing him into the same ending just feels inherently wrong. Because that’s not how storytelling works, it’s not how life works. The choices we make, our actions shape the direction or our lives, you can’t set a character at two different starting points and send them on two completely different emotional journeys and expect for them to arrive at the exact same place in the end. I think it’s why they made this significant change with the character Henry to help the audience along. In the game, he’s just trying to get away from FEDRA and join up with his group, but in the show, Henry reveals that he traded information to FEDRA about the rebel leader, a man who was loved and admired by all, leading to his torture and murder, and then clearly lays out the exact moral question the finale will be asking. “So, still think they should take it easy on me? Or am I the bad guy? I don’t know what you’re waiting on man. The answer’s easy, I am the bad guy because I did a bad guy thing.” It just feels like another shortcut, instead of taking the proper time to build these moments and force the audience to contend with these moral ideas on their own, the show just asks and answers these questions for us, softening the blow with Henry before Joel does something much worse. But this wasn’t the only thing that bothered me in the final episode. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that a ten-minute flashback at the opening of an already shorter episode was a strange choice, I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that we didn’t need a midichlorian explanation for Ellie’s immunity, or that I’m the only who was frustrated when this guy forgot to do the one simple thing Marlene asked him to, but there’s something much bigger at play that started to fall apart well before the finale. There are practically zero infected to be found anywhere in this world apparently, except for when our characters are surrounded by rebels intent on killing them, and conveniently an entire horde of them comes in at the last second to save the day, but most of the time you couldn’t be blamed for forgetting all about the infected while watching the show. And I know it’s because they wanted to spend more time on the characters, but I genuinely don’t understand why they see these as two separate things. The action informs the character and the story. The whole point is that the infected are everywhere, and even if you’ve cleared out a fair amount of them, you still have to worry about the spores, something they abandoned in the series, but at every turn the game is establishing that this world is an incredibly dangerous place. Yes, the people are the real threat, that will always be the case in a good post-apocalyptic story, but the game makes it clear that there’s plenty of danger to be found dealing with either people or infected, and often even just the environment itself. But you need that feeling of constant danger, whereas for Joel and Ellie in the series, it’s like a glorified hike with some camping, where nothing goes wrong for hundreds of miles at a time. How many travel montages do we see, crossing wide open landscapes without a care in the world. In the game we’re faced with an endless gauntlet of death and desolation that when we finally get these moments to slow down and just breathe, they feel like an oasis out in the desert. But most of their time on the show is already a reprieve, as most of their journey seems to go pretty smoothly, and these moments lose a lot of impact as a result, which not only shifts the tonal balance and the context of their relationship, but the context of this world. In the game we fight through thousands of infected along our journey, where every single encounter could lead to one single bite or scratch or breath that ends it all. “My mask broke, don’t leave me to turn, please.” These moments reinforce why the hope of a cure is so significant. It feels like the single most important thing that could help put this world back together, but in the show, where the infected are barely ever seen and barely ever a threat, it makes a cure feel almost redundant. If people are the real problem, would a cure even make anything better? And this question can still be considered in the game, there’s no guarantee that a cure is even possible let alone that it would fix the world, but in a world so overrun by infected and the constant threat of being turned, it’s at least a promise of hope. The whole mechanism driving the plot is Ellie’s immunity, something not so secretly borrowed from Children of Men, where we see a dystopian future plagued by decades of global infertility, and the one woman who becomes pregnant after all of this time. Her very existence brings hope to a hopeless world, and that is the same function that Ellie has for this world. The whole point being that Joel selfishly keeps this hope for himself at the expense of every human being on the planet. His refusal to let her go, to follow what he knows that she would have even wanted, is the ultimate act of love but also an act of ultimate evil. And his choice loses a lot that contextual weight if the infected are barely a problem in the first place. That’s what makes this ending so perfect in the game, the dominoes were set in motion from the very beginning. We see how violent Joel can be without a second thought, we see how selfish he can be, we see how terrifying this world is and how any single misstep might be your last, and we see how this world and Joel’s influence begins to turn Ellie into a killer, a bond formed through violence and keeping each other alive through every kind of danger imaginable. We know how important this cure would be for humanity, but after Joel has opened himself to loving someone again, we know that nothing is more important than her, not even saving the world. Which doesn’t mean that we support it, but we do understand it. But the show cuts out so many of those vital pieces that build their relationship, it condenses all of that organic growth into such a short period of time for the audience, that this choice feels like it betrays everything we’ve learned about Joel. The trick that the game pulls is by starting you off as a coldblooded killer very early on, and you watch as he slowly warms to Ellie and shows a softer side. But in the show this is basically reversed, as we watch a typically non-violent man become a mass murderer, and I feel like that misses the entire point of the game. The Last of Us is not a story of a surrogate father and daughter becoming killers together, it’s the story of a man who infects his surrogate daughter with this disease, the violence and the rage, who does something so selfish, so unforgivable, that has devastating and far-reaching consequences for every single character in the story. Without going into spoilers, that’s kind of the entire point of The Last of Us Part 2, and it gets even darker and bleaker and far more violent than the first game, so if they were already shying away from this stuff in the first season, I’m really worried about what to expect next. The Last of Us is one my absolute favorite games of all time, it inspired the only gaming video that I’ve made so far, and I wanted to love this show as much as everyone else seems to, but I feel like they got some of the most important pieces of this story fundamentally wrong, when it had every ingredient it needed to be the greatest video game adaptation ever made. Granted, it still is, but that was quite the low bar to surpass, and I have to say I was expecting something much better. Which isn’t to say the show was all bad, far from it. The two flashback episodes in particular are beautifully done, the cast was phenomenal, and there is much else that could be said for its merits. But to be honest, it does remind me of that final season of Game of Thrones, and I don’t think any great performances or effects can save bad writing, which is something I can’t believe I’m even saying, especially considering the talent behind this show, including the guy who made the original game, but I’m genuinely unsure of how all this happened. It almost feels like they were ashamed of its video game origins and tried to make a pure emotional drama, but the reason The Last of Us was so powerful was that it was both an amazing action game and an incredible emotional drama, arguably the best in all of gaming and better than the vast majority movies or TV. But that action, the violence, the darkness and the ambiguity is inextricably connected to the story, and I wish the show had done more to keep some of these aspects of the game alive, or if they were going to be bold and make a new version of these characters and this story, then to actually commit to that and not just retcon everything back to the game’s ending for the last few episodes. Because they can claim all they want that they were trying to do something new, they didn’t want to make the same Joel and Ellie that we saw in the game or to tell an identical story, but come on, let’s be honest here. As it stands it’s like a show with a split personality, where half of the time it’s actively going in the opposite direction of the game and its emotional core, and then the other half of the time they’re copying it word for word, beat for beat, and it just didn’t work for me and I’m hoping I’m not alone in that feeling, but I’d love to know what you guys think. And even if you think that I got things completely wrong, hopefully you can see that this all does stem from a place of love for these games. I just happen to think that they are still the far superior way to experience this story, even if you can’t play it yourself and watch a playthrough online. I think they are both absolute masterpieces, and tell some of the greatest stories ever told in any medium, and if you loved the show I can promise you, you’d love the games even more. But anyways, that’s pretty much everything I wanted to get off my chest, I appreciate you sticking to the end, and I’ll see you next time.
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Channel: Daniel Netzel
Views: 16,647
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: film radar, daniel netzel, the last of us video essay, the last of us game vs show, the last of us game is better than the show, the last of us tv show review, the last of us fails as an adaptation, the last of us is a bad adaptation, the last of us game was better, the last of us tv and game comparison, daniel netzel the last of us, the last of us, the last of us hbo, the last of us hbo review, the last of us show, the last of us critique, the last of us problems
Id: 0fegWEsW1X0
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 33min 31sec (2011 seconds)
Published: Fri Mar 24 2023
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