How HBO’s The Last Of Us breaks the curse of shit video game adaptations

Forget flesh eating zombies: nothing sends shivers down my spine faster than the tagline: ‘adapted from the hit video game’.

It's been 30 years since the first movie based on a video game graced cinema-goers in the form of the super terrible Super Mario Bros, and it's been on a one way warp pipe downwards ever since.

Uncharted. Prince of Persia. Mortal Kombat (1995). Mortal Kombat (2021). Great games. Shit movies.

It's no surprise. Plots for videos games just don't usually* make good screenplays. They’re not supposed to.

When adaptations inevitably do happen, either their wafer-thin storylines get so padded out they barely resemble the source (hello, Kylie Minogue and Jean-Claude Van Damme in Street Fighter) or, they try to stick too close to the original's plot, and you get disastrous slogs like Assassin's Creed.

So when video game developer Naughty Dog announced that their universally acclaimed opus The Last Of Us would be getting the prestige television treatment via an HBO series order, I was more cautious than a smuggler outside of a quarantine zone.

If you haven't had the pleasure of playing The Last Of Us (or you prefer to avoid harrowing trauma, I get it), it's a third person survival-action game set twenty years after an outbreak of a Cordyceps fungal virus that has ravaged the world; turning most of the population into mindless zombies.

You play as Joel - a grizzled smuggler who lost his daughter on outbreak day - and are tasked with taking and protecting an orphan girl, Ellie - who just happens to be the only person immune to the infection and is key to creating a vaccine - across post-apocalyptic USA.

I’m a huge fan of both entries in the series, so saying I had hefty expectations would be putting it lightly. When the original title launched on Sony's PlayStation 3 ten years ago, it set a new benchmark for the emotional storytelling in AAA games. Despite being released in the midst of peak zombie pop culture saturation (The Walking Dead, World War Z) it offered a fresh perspective on the genre.

It wasn't the nail biting survival-action gameplay or the gorgeous graphics that made it stand out - it was the story.

The game's best feature was that it came preloaded with an emotionally gripping, fantastically written and acted narrative that would be usually associated with critically acclaimed television or the works of Cormac McCarthy. It wasn't afraid to juxtapose intense, gory combat with quiet, character driven moments.

Less Paul W.S. Anderson's schlocky Resident Evil series and more Coen Brothers’ harrowing No Country For Old Men.

So it was with nervous trepidation that I sat down to watch the series premiere. I hit play and held my breath tightly as though there was a Clicker in the next room. 81 anxiety inducing minutes later, I was relieved. In fact, I was ecstatic: not only did I just watch an incredibly faithful adaptation of one of my favourite games, I’d just watched the first excellent live-action video game adaptation. Ever?

So, how did HBO manage to get something that virtually every studio has failed spectacularly at for the past few decades so right?

The pedigree of the creative team behind the series certainly helps. Craig Mazin, who proved that he is more than adept at depicting the physical and moral decay with his HBO miniseries Chernobyl - is a huge fan of the original game. Neil Druckmann - co-president at Naughty Dog and the creative director and writer of both game entries - in turn calls Chernobyl a "masterpiece". Besties alert.

Key to The Last Of Us is Joel and Ellie's relationship. It's the emotional core of the series. If you don't buy it, the whole thing crumbles. It's why the original game struck such a chord with players and critics.

Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian) and Bella Ramsey (Game of Thrones) are perfectly cast as Joel and Ellie. They aren't trying to emulate or imitate their excellent video game counterparts, yet they are inherently Joel and Ellie (fun fact: Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, the game's voice and motion caption actors both score cameos in the series).

Pascal, who's no stranger to playing a gruff daddy with precious cargo brings a world weary, quiet painfulness to Joel. Ramsey nails the awkward emotional complexity that comes with being a teenager. Her Ellie is hopeful, funny and ferocious when she needs to be.

What becomes apparent as the season plays out is that The Last Of Us’ greatest strength is not the stellar acting, intricate production design or heart-racing action scenes, though, all of that certainly helps.

Its greatest asset is that it's not concerned with delivering an identical, 1:1 translation from the video game to TV.

Mazin and Druckmann aren't afraid to deviate from the source material when the adaptation calls for it. When they do, it always feels extremely faithful to it, like a natural extension.

Some of the strongest moments of the season is when the story strays from the game's pre-existing plot. In a video game, you’re confined to one character, a singular point of view.

The showrunners allow their adaptation to breathe and linger on characters who were reduced to the background in the original title.

A clear highlight from the first season comes in the third episode, which takes a detour from Joel and Ellie's story to show the heartbreaking origin of doomsday prepper Bill (Nick Offerman) and his partner Frank's (Murray Bartlett) romance, the latter who's only mentioned by name in the game.

It's slow, deliberate and elevates the world of The Last Of Us, feeling simultaneously more intimate and much larger.

Other freshly invented plot elements and expanded roles slot seamlessly into the original game's core narrative, never detracting from the core story and only enhancing the in universe world building.

The series also benefits from The Last Of Us Part II's existence, foreshadowing certain character's paths and future decisions early on in this first season.

The greatest deviation from the core material concerns how the Cordyceps outbreak is actually transmitted.

In the original games, the virus was spread via spores in the air which required your character to wear a gas mask for a fair chunk of gameplay. Perhaps not wanting to confine Pascal's handsome mug to yet another mask a la The Mandalorian, the TV series foregoes the airborne spores in favour of an interconnected hive of tendrils.

It works well, and feels at home in the show's universe.

"We decided, early on, that we didn't wanna do that for the show" Druckmann told Collider.

"Eventually, those conversations led us to these tendrils. And then, just thinking about how there's a passage that happens from one infected to another, and like fungus does, it could become a network that is interconnected. It became very scary to think that they’re all working against us in this unified way, which was a concept that I really liked, that got developed in the show."

The only real complaint I have about the show is squarely on me: I know exactly where the plot is going.

This doesn't detract from the quality of the storytelling of the show at all. The first season ends exactly where the first game does, so there's zero filler (its Ellie-centric DLC Left Behind is effortlessly slotted in much earlier storywise).

It's exciting waiting for the game's beats to play out on screen, and even more so when the script throws structural and narrative curveballs, playing with my expectations.

I can't wait to see where season two and beyond takes Joel and Ellie, with its continuation seeming like a given the overwhelming positive reaction to the premiere episode.

The Last Of Us does what no other video game to screen adaptation has really done before: it's actually fantastic television, independent of the game.

It's a show that amplifies what made the original so special, but it's a tough watch.

Knowing what's coming for Joel and Ellie adds a whole new level of tragedy and emotion I wasn't sure I was ready to experience again.

*Detective Pikachu gang rise up.

The Last Of Us is streaming now on Binge.