With more than 30 million copies sold, the video game The Last of Us, available on PC and PlayStation, has already achieved cult status. Building on this heritage, HBO and Sony have started a TV series, the first season of which starts on January 15 on HBO and HBO Max, and on January 16 in France on Amazon’s SVOD platform, Prime Video. In production, none less than Craig Mazin, the screenwriter of the award-winning mini-series Chernobylbut also and above all Neil Druckmann, video game director The Last of Us and Uncharted, as well as the director of Naughty Dog, the company behind the game, Evan Wells. But should we look at this particularly awaited adaptation? Here is our verdict.
The Last of Us : finally a really successful adaptation of a video game
Adapting a video game, whether in series or in the cinema, has never been easy. Many have broken their teeth, we think in particular of tomb Raiderthe continuation of which has been postponed indefinitely, but also to Assassin’s Creed Where Prince of Persiawhich did not have the expected success in theaters. But with The Last of Us, HBO wants to change the situation. At the end of the pilot, we can already say that the contract seems fulfilled. Because Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are not content to adapt the story of the first video game, they also want to enrich its universe. In The Last of Us, the story did not wait for us to unfold: a mysterious evil reduces humanity to a trickle and triggers the apocalypse by transforming humans into Infected. From now on, the objective is to survive in a world where nature has taken back its rights.
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It is in this context that we follow a duo composed of Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey (from the series Game Of Thrones). The first slips with undeniable talent into the skin of Joël, a man worn out by the end of a world, while the second is far from being reduced to a simple emotional sidekick. She is also the real main character of the series, and the writers make us understand it in a subtle and successful way. A look, more than words, allows us to realize the relationship that is created between the two characters, carried by actors who seem to have been made for these roles.
The Last of Us : a context déjà vu magnified by an amazing narration
It is all the more striking that in the video game, neither Pedro Pascal nor Bella Ramsay embodies these characters. For the motion capture and the voices, the Naughty Dog studio offered the services of Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson – who are also present in the series. Do you have to have played both games to benefit from this adaptation? The answer is no. In fact, from its first minutes, the series The Last of Us manages to embark us in his universe without ever multiplying the references, while offering sufficiently significant freedoms so that everyone finds himself there. The subject – the aftermath of an apocalypse creating Infected – is not original, but it is the way it is told on screen that makes everything else work, and this, despite the profusion of terms not necessarily obvious to grasp at first glance.
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But that’s where the talent of Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann operates: the viewer that we are, whether he has played video games or not, hangs on to the characters and the reasons for which they fight. The Last of Us does not talk about the apocalypse, the series even less, and even if the themes of horror are more present in this adaptation, we are faced with a very convincing, poignant result, where emotion is more important than anything the rest. Without dead time, we are drawn into something that goes beyond his characters as much as ourselves. If it is still difficult to conclude that this is the best possible adaptation, HBO offers here a high-flying series which is likely to satisfy everyone, in particular thanks to the performance of its two main actors.
The Last of Us season 1, available from January 16 on Prime Video
