HBO's The Last of Us is a Pointless Adaptation

so I've just seen HBO's adaptation of The Last of Us and honestly I don't hate it I was actually pretty surprised in how faithful certain scenes were to the original and while some of the stuff they did add was questionable to say the least and of course there's some race swapping of characters which I always enjoy I'm not gonna pretend that this first episode was terrible it wasn't so before we get into the breakdown as you might expect due to copyright reasons I can't use a lot of clips from the show so I'm only going to use them when necessary and have b-roll from some other game and some clips from the original Last of Us were appropriate so without further Ado let's get into the breakdown the first scene is in 1968 as we see some kind of talk show talk about the threat of a global pandemic that could Wipe Out the human population which no doubt they put this scene in here to relate the apocalypse to covid but as the second guest on the show points out humans always win against viruses and bacteria in the end but if a fungus were to mutate and attach to humans much like a parasite then we would all be [ __ ] then the theme song plays which rather surprisingly actually is the original theme from the game that was a nice touch and as we get to the first real scene of the show you'll notice one major change immediately that Sarah is now black what does this add to the show why absolutely nothing but it doesn't stop there as Joel is now Hispanic and yes I know probably quite a few of you especially those who never actually played The Last of Us probably thought Joel was Hispanic he kind of looks vaguely Hispanic but as soon as you saw his brother Tommy it was pretty obvious that he's not and so we couldn't have that Tommy is brown now I can't wait for all the comments calling me a racist just for noticing [ __ ] that surely never gets old in another note change is the prologue now takes place in 2003 instead of 2013 so that the quote unquote present can be in 2023 in this entire intro section is full of fluff that wasn't in the game we get to see Joel's neighbors who are middle aged maybe a bit older living with their invalid mother we get to see Sarah go to school in Austin Texas and look anyone who's played the game which is probably going to be a significant amount of the people who watch this show knows Sarah dies in the beginning so all of this extra fluff doesn't really do anything but pan out the show you could make the argument that it's here to make us care more about Sarah but I really didn't partially because of the race swap but also partially because they tried to go for a whole child prodigy thing they don't lean into it super heavily but it's there she's clearly supposed to be the smart teenage girl while the adults are bumbling idiots except that in reality she's not actually smart as you'll see in a later scene so of course just like the game it's Joel's birthday and so for her father's birthday she steals some of his money to go get his watch fixed but of course the outbreak is already starting so she's rushed out of the store the show doesn't explicitly explain what's going on but obviously we all knew the main point being Sarah doesn't know and so she visits her neighbor's house an old invalid Grandma starts acting strange obviously somehow she's infected now this is already a problem you're gonna notice with the show it doesn't come up in this episode though some of us already know from an article that they've changed the main method of infection from spores which makes sense given its fungus to now tendrils which begs the question how the hell did the grandma get infected but not her son and his wife and just like a generic horror movie the dog starts whining noticing that something's wrong with the grandma Sarah heads home and notices there's jets flying overhead still not setting off any alarm Bells I guess in her head then later that night the news starts talking about a series of violent incidents happening in the city the news blaming it on some kind of new street drug and here we actually get a somewhat decent retelling of a scene from the game where Sarah presents the fixed watch to her dad but they kind of [ __ ] up the cutesiness here this is what I'm talking about in the original scene in the game this moment had to be heartwarming so that later when Sarah dies we are far more emotionally impacted by it but in this version Sarah is just too snarky and doesn't act nearly as cute so the landing was kind of botched here I'm grateful that they actually took several direct scenes from the game which you'll see over the course of episode but you'll notice a TV show from HBO which is supposed to be higher quality or at least they used to be can't imitate a scene with the same amount of emotional depth as a game nearly a decade old after Sarah is put to bed and wakes up a few hours later once again more unnecessary fluff is added to the story as the neighbor's dog shows up acting strangely and Sarah for some reason tries to drag the dog home obviously doesn't want to go in the house so obviously something is wrong and like a generic shitty horror movie she decides to see if something's wrong with the neighbor's house which of course there is the [ __ ] grandma who has now become a zombie has eaten the other two residents of the house and Sarah like a [ __ ] idiot just stands there gawking eventually she remembers she can run away and Joel and Tommy show up to save her kill the grandma zombie and they make their way out of the neighborhood now the next scene isn't actually decently faithful Recreation of the beginning of the game when they start driving into a town which I'll never understand why they thought it was a good idea to drive into a town during a zombie apocalypse but I'll try to play you a side by side comparison here it was actually pretty cool to see this done so well eventually a plane crashes behind them and a piece of shrapnel hits the car it flips somehow off screen and Joel now has to pick up his daughter and carry her and you guys already know where this is going Joel and Tommy are separated and as Joel's running away a zombie starts to chase him and a military guy shoots the zombie saving him or so he thinks and just like the game the soldier is ordered to kill Joel and Sarah and pretty much this whole thing is done one to one but once again I just don't think it was done as well as the game part of it is the acting but also part of it is just the lighting of the scene in the original version you could see Sarah's face clearly and A Tear is rolling down her face as she bleeds out she's screaming it's [ __ ] brutal I cried the first time I saw it but this version I don't know it's kind of lacking something it just feels a little cheaper which is weird because again this was a PS3 game yes it looked amazing for the time but it's weird that like real [ __ ] people couldn't sell it as well as the animation I guess so now we fast forward 20 years to the present and I hope you like fluff because there's a whole lot more unnecessary scenes in this version and yeah that's to be expected it's a TV show of course they're gonna add a lot more little story details and change some things otherwise what would be the point of making an adaptation it starts off with a kid wandering to the outskirts of the quarantine Zone fedra brings him in to some facility ability and they sort of fool you into thinking oh maybe they're gonna cure them but no the kids infected they give them a lethal injection and in the very next scene we see Joel and Tess throw the kid's body in a fire and yeah actually that sets the tone pretty well for post-apocalypse America now another problem I have is Tess's actress I already complained in my remake of a remaster video that they aged up tests like 20 [ __ ] years or something made her uglier an actress who plays her here is even a further step down from her remake model I mean what the [ __ ] man almost everyone in this show looks like they've been beaten with the ugly stick it just doesn't [ __ ] make sense just because there's an apocalypse doesn't mean all the Attractive people died in the next scene we get to see a public execution for people attempting to leave the quarantine Zone which is a bit of a whiplash next to all the women who seem to be working for fedra and if for some reason you're one wondering why I have a problem with this I think it should be obvious in a [ __ ] apocalypse scenario there's not gonna be any [ __ ] diversity hires there's not going to be any virtue signaling you're gonna hire the person who is the best for that job especially when it's the police or military of all things you need that to be as strong as possible even in the apocalypse we can't escape leftists dude in the next scene we see Joel making a drug deal with one of the corrupt Federal cops trading some medication for some cigarettes and the next scene is kind of bizarre as we see Tess has been captured and beaten up by some goons and it looks like she's being interrogated but instead this beta male looking bad guy basically swindled her out of an engine that she tried to pay for but he'd already sold it to someone else but for some reason he's trying to be a nice guy about it and ask her how to resolve it because he's scared of Joel and then before they managed to come to an an agreement the wall explodes somehow the bad guy gets away I guess he just runs or something and the other people are dead but Tess is completely fine and we learn that the wall exploded because the fireflies are a bunch of [ __ ] psychos and just blow up [ __ ] on the one hand I can applaud them for sticking with the whole resistance not being a universal force of goodness which is such a tired Trope and media but this is just a little bit too convenient I don't know why they didn't just stick with the original plot from the game I guess there wasn't enough money left in the budget for a shootout at this point but yeah if you remember the tutorial level from the original yeah that's completely cut out of this version and the scene ends with Tess being arrested by fedra because they think she's a firefly and the next scene we're introduced to Ellie and as you can imagine this is the worst casting of the show by far this [ __ ] Goblin Bella Ramsey you may remember her as one of the worst characters from the later Game of Thrones seasons has now been cast as Ellie for some reason and the problem is not that she's a terrible actress I honestly think she was just fine here it's just that her face is so [ __ ] distracting I don't know if she has fetal alcohol syndrome or down syndrome but she certainly has some issue of some kind she doesn't look like a normal human being and I'm certain I'm gonna make at least one or two more videos on this show so I'll try not to bring that up too many more times but please for the love of God stop putting this woman in anything once we get back to Joel again we see what he traded the cigarettes for he gives them to some underground Communications guy who he's been using to communicate with Tommy and Tommy has not responded in three weeks and so Joel wants to travel to a radio tower in Wyoming himself to make sure his brother's all right then he heads home digs out some old tools charts out his path from Boston to to the radio tower has some drinks takes a [ __ ] ton of meds and finally heads off to sleep another interesting change here is Joel and Tess are clearly an item of some kind it was sort of implied in the original but you could argue it was purely platonic here they're shown sleeping together there's no sex scene but definitely a bit of intimacy honestly I don't really care about this change either way the next morning we finally get to what was essentially the first scene in the present in the original game where Joel and Tess plot to get the battery back and in the next scene we see the fireflies base and they actually seem to be in pretty good shape compared to when you meet them in the game and we get to see Marlene's spectacular leadership skills of how about you follow your [ __ ] orders my answer is to follow [ __ ] orders tell them to follow [ __ ] orders very inspiring now honestly her Casting is pretty decent actually looks quite a bit like the character from the game which already you might have had some feelings around the leader of a huge resistance group being a black woman but also her second in command is also a black woman at what point is this just straight up racial favoritism I've heard people in Europe think that the population of African Americans in this country is something like 50 percent because that's the representation in our media and as you already know it's only 13 percent and if you're taking just the women that's six and a half percent and yet three somewhat significant characters in this show have been black women now Sarah obviously is mixed race but the point still stands certainly high enough to make intelligent people start asking questions the next couple scenes are mostly inconsequential the First shows Joel and Tess discussing their plan of sneaking through the sewers to get into Robert's base the next scene shows Marvel lean and Ellie having a one-on-one just driving it home once again how important it is that Ellie is immune to the fungus then after that Joel and Tess sneak through the sewers they find a dead clicker which is obviously a tease for them to show up later but I don't even know why the thing is dead infused to the wall that's kind of weird I don't really care enough to look into this but wouldn't the last sewer maintenance person have to have been sent down there like months ago for this to have happened and as the duo break into the base they see a shootout has already gone down and conveniently pretty much all of the fireflies and Robert's gang are dead including Robert himself with the only survivors being Marlene the second in command and Ellie this is a really weird change from the game that doesn't really make sense to me because you're essentially taking out a major scene showing Tess being a badass maybe a little bit of a Mary Sue I would argue but she hasn't really done anything of note yet on the show whereas at least for the First Act of the game she was a major player could certainly hold her own at least in a gun fight and she humiliates and kills this slimy dude who betrayed her and regardless of how I feel about the scene personally it just doesn't make sense for the show to be more woke on other angles but to also take out a female empowerment scene I guess I'm just saying it's kind of stupid no matter how you look at it and so of course just like the game Marlene promises Joel all sorts of [ __ ] all the stuff he needs and more if he'll escort Ellie across the country and of course he accepts so the trio heads back home we get a little moment that's supposed to show how smart Ellie is as she figured out the secret radio code is based on what decade of Music they'll play and we actually get another pretty faithful retelling of a scene from the game as Joel lays down on the couch I actually think the dialogue is one for one here but yeah I thought that was a really nice touch the only reason I even recognized it is because of the Remake remaster but I guess if you're a Super Fan you'll appreciate it that much more now the escape from Boston finally begins and this is probably the most underwhelming retelling of the show because basically all of the gameplay part of it was completely cut out and it looks far less cinematic if you remember it was raining super hard there were spotlights darting around the collapsed ground and of course you had to sneak past as the searchlights went past you in this version they just kind of hide behind one car crawl through a tunnel and boom the whole thing's done and we get another kind of shitty Recreation of the scene where Joel and Tess discover that Ellie is immune to the virus as the dirty cop from earlier is there but he's not going to accept any deal from Joel this time and right as the three of them are about to get arrested Joel has a flashback to when his daughter died and so he beats the man to death and Ellie reveals her bite mark Joel and Tess don't seem to immediately believe it but they keep moving anyway and the episode ends as they Venture off into the infected part of the city now my immediate thoughts after viewing this episode was that honestly that was pretty decent then honestly the more I thought about it afterward as I was giving you this little synopsis here the more I realized how utterly pointless this adaptation is when you think about it this is a TV adaptation of a video game emulating a movie so in other words the original game was not made using the strengths of video games as an art form aka the interactivity instead wanting desperately to be respected by the film industry Naughty Dog put most of their efforts into the storytelling and while the story itself is kind of generic how it was told was extremely well done for the time certainly a ahead of its time if you somehow consider modern gaming to be better than old games the graphics were probably the best on the PS3 the animations were fantastic the voice acting was surprisingly great but the gameplay was just average maybe a little above average but instead of earning the respect of the film industry not even of its own parent company Sony who decided to make an Uncharted movie instead of a Last of Us movie we are instead stuck with an HBO show which 10 years ago might have been awesome but HBO is probably less than a shadow of its former self at this point so I expect it to only get worse from here and so honestly there was no way they could have made this show and made it feel like it really added something to the last of us and it doesn't help that we already had an unnecessary remake of an unnecessary remaster just a few months ago and I know we're only one episode in but the question stands what does this adaptation add to The Last of Us it didn't really add much more to the story except a little bit of background to what happened to the fireflies but like I said I didn't hate it I think Pedro Pascal makes for a pretty good Joel he's a good actor now I do think he held back quite a bit on Joel's brutality yeah he beat that one guy to death and he suggested just running over some of the people during the apocalypse but he doesn't seem nearly as angry as Joel was so I hope he steps it up in the following episodes Bella Ramsay other than her being a goblin person did a pretty good job I guess though it seems like the writers made Ellie even more of a [ __ ] in the show than she was in the game but it's not like she had that many lines so I guess we'll have to wait and see and I feel cautious about complimenting the show for being entertaining because all of the entertaining stuff was from The Last of Us but it's not like I was bored while watching it and I didn't hate it like I did Halo and Resident Evil so I'm trying my hardest here to look for compliments but as it stands right now this is actually a pretty decent adaptation outside of the race swapping that's really the huge alarm bells ringing off this will no doubt be more woke than the original game and the original game was honestly was pretty woke for its time but it was before game or gate or any of that huge culture War [ __ ] so people didn't point it out as much back then so the question is would I recommend you watch it only if you didn't play the remake of the remaster and for some reason you want to see uglier actors play the roles of animated characters and there'd be very little action outside of the initial zombie apocalypse but I will be reviewing the rest of the series not Episode by episode because that [ __ ] just gets old after a certain point but I'll probably do two to three episodes at a time especially since there's other games to talk about this man like forespoken which I may or may not Skip and the Dead Space remake so that's about it I'll see you next time guys

Channel: Synthetic Man

Views: 130,790

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Id: pl2BMy8wBv8

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 17 2023