October 13 2024
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The Last of Us’ is a zombie thriller about single parenting
New York Times
last updated:
Jan 15,2023
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You would be forgiven for suffering, at this point,
from pandemic fatigue. I’m referring here not to COVID-19 but to the many
plagues that have kicked off TV apocalypses in recent years. From “Station
Eleven” to “12 Monkeys”, “The Walking Dead” to “The Stand”. “Y: The Last Man”
to “The Last Man on Earth”, this is the way the world ends, and ends, and ends.اضافة اعلان
HBO’s high-gloss zombie thriller “The Last of Us,” beginning
Sunday, offers a biological twist on its cataclysm. An ophiocordyceps fungus,
akin to the real-life one that ghoulishly takes over the bodies of ants,
mutates to infest humans, turning civilization into a global mushroom farm.
In the taxonomy of horror, its undead are “fast zombies,” as
opposed to the shambling hordes in old-time creature features. So the mayhem
comes quickly in this series. The emotional connection moves more slow and
steady, but it eventually gets there.
The series kicks off in Standard Apocalypse-Onset Mode. Joel
(Pedro Pascal), a construction contractor in Texas, starts his birthday in 2003
eating breakfast with his family and ends it amid the chaos of civilization’s
collapse. The intense but bloated 81-minute pilot runs up a high body count,
making clear that there is minimal plot armor to go around here.
Twenty years later, in 2023, we find Joel in the
military-occupied ruins of Boston, a grim, grizzled survivor. Battling fungi
does not make one a fun guy. With his black-marketeering partner, Tess (Anna
Torv), he lands a job escorting Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a 14-year-old who is
immune to zombie bites, on a risky journey that could lead to a cure.
Ellie may or may not be the savior of humanity, but she
certainly rescues “The Last of Us” from apocalyptic mope. In “Game of Thrones”
(in which Pascal also did time), Ramsey was memorable as Lady Lyanna Mormont,
the fearsome child leader of a northern fief. Here, she is all foulmouthed
verve, her adolescent insolence turbocharged by the liberation of living after
the end of the world. Her fighting spirit is, well, infectious.
“The Last of Us” is based on the Naughty Dog video game of
the same name, from which it takes its nine-episode, first-season arc and many
of its strongest scenes and best lines. (Neil Druckmann, a creator of the game,
co-writes the series with Craig Mazin of “Chernobyl.”)
It really finds its voice, though, when it expands on the
source material. The third episode, featuring Nick Offerman and Murray
Bartlett, builds out a relationship alluded to only briefly in the game. The
episode advances the plot only marginally, but it throws the show’s range
wide-open. This is an apocalypse story in which you will be allowed to feel and
even laugh, a game adaptation able to grant dimensionality to its nonplayer
characters.
But the story must live or (un)die on the connection between
Joel and Ellie. You may know Pascal from “The Mandalorian,” in which his
helmeted bounty hunter shepherds a cuddly alien through the Star Wars galaxy’s
sleazier precincts. “The Last of Us” posits: What if Baby Yoda could swear? A
prickly buddy comedy unfolds between Joel and his unruly charge, and Pascal’s
laconic gunslinger appeal translates well to this bleaker universe.
What matters most about zombie stories is what they say
about the living. In TV’s most popular example, “The Walking Dead,” it was
nothing much good. Over its long run, the show fell into a pessimism bordering
on misanthropy, committed to the ideas that beasts and sadists would thrive in
the end times, that trust is a sucker’s bet and that only your own small clan
can be counted on — if even them.
“The Last of Us” is dark, do not get me wrong. But it has if
not optimism, exactly, then a generosity toward its survivors. Its hardscrabble
apocalypse has antagonists, but they are not generally monsters. (Except for
the actual monsters.) They are terrified kid soldiers, starving people who have
suffered grievous losses, desperate leaders cracking under unasked-for
responsibility.
The story is strongest when it zooms in on its central duo,
who evolve into allies and something like family. Joel’s paternal fondness for
Ellie, it becomes clear, scares him more than any undead beastie.
What matters most about zombie stories is what they say about the living.
That fear is the core of “The Last of Us.” It’s an extended
horror story of single parenting. Joel’s struggle is a heightened version of
the everyday experience of how being responsible for a vulnerable life makes
you vulnerable yourself, how it can make you do unforgivable things for them —
or to them — in the name of protection.
Through Joel, we feel the heartbreak of this world. Through
Ellie, we see its wonder. When they come across the wreckage of a jetliner, she
asks if he ever flew in one, and he recalls what an uncomfortable ordeal air
travel was. “Dude,” she says, “you got to go up in the sky.”
It shouldn’t be surprising that a drama based on a video
game can have heart. A great, smart game depends on personal connection. In
fact, so can a great, dumb one, as Ellie finds when she delightedly comes
across a Mortal Kombat arcade machine, a relic of an age when battling to the
death was casual entertainment.
The game comes up more than once in “The Last of Us,” a
reminder of the undying “FINISH HIM!” appeal of stylized violence, of which this
series is well aware. If it is zombie spatter you want, “The Last of Us” has it
by the bucketful.
If, on the other hand, you’re hoping that it will upend the
plague-apocalypse genre as “The Sopranos” did the mob drama or “The Wire” did
the cop show — well, not quite. But with its smidgen of hope and its rejection
of nihilism, “The Last of Us” has a few key mutations that make it a variant of
interest.