How The Last of Us on HBO Attempts to Capture the Difficult Morality of the Video Game

Adaptations of novels have a clear purpose: They give substance to ideas that were before merely ideas. Even though you knew the song was announcing the horrors of the Red Wedding, the delight of watching Game of Thrones as a reader was seeing the dragons portrayed or hearing “The Rains of Castamere” for the first time.

The purpose of a video-game adaptation is different. It may be argued that relatively few have enhanced their original works. Leading studios in the medium, like Naughty Dog, produce visuals that are on par with the best visual effects in both television and movies.

Many critics would contend that the emotional resonance of the plot was much stronger in Naughty Dog’s Indiana Jones-inspired Uncharted adventure games than in the film adaptation from last year starring Tom Holland.

The co-president of Naughty Dog, Neil Druckmann, gave that particular film, over which he had limited creative control, tepid praise. He has put far more effort into the upcoming Jan. 15 HBO series The Last of Us, which is based on the game he loves the most.

The premise may be recognisable: A fungus causes the majority of people on Earth to turn into zombies. Twenty years later, a smuggler named Joel, who tragically lost his daughter at the beginning of the epidemic, reluctantly agrees to act as Ellie’s bodyguard because she might hold the key to a cure at the age of 14. He leads her through a desolate country populated by ravenous human tribes and the unsettlingly beautiful, mushroom-headed undead.

However, critics concur that The Last of Us is high art and may be the best video game ever made, in large part due to the moral dilemmas that it frequently forces players into. The 2013 game garnered a tonne of praise and sold more than 1 million copies in its first week.

An adaptation was in the works for for a decade, and its high reputation and nuanced moral realm loomed large. In the end, Druckmann collaborated with Chernobyl showrunner Craig Mazin. The tale and Mazin’s Emmy-winning HBO series have a lot in common, so the game “was literary to me,” according to Mazin.

With the help of a $100 million HBO budget, the team improves the images of decaying cities and gets heartbreaking work from their protagonists, Pedro Pascal as the tough but delicate Joel and Bella Ramsey as the foul-mouthed yet frightened Ellie.

But there will need to be more than simply a love letter that faithfully retells a tale that transformed the medium to justify its existence and that expensive price tag. The strength of the video game is that it involves the player in the unethical choices that Joel and Ellie must make in order to survive. When a controller is swapped out for a remote, is that power still present?

Joel and Ellie unintentionally enter a trap that has been prepared by a rebel organisation that has just ousted the fascist military authority in their city in a midseason episode. The previous administration used kid soldiers and pitted neighbours against one another. These revolutionaries would be heroes in any other tale.

However, they have our heroes pinned down. Joel starts to fire their escape, but he’s middle-aged and his knees hurt. He has taken a step backward. Ellie grabs a gun as a man storms into the room behind Joel, forcing her to make a choice. She had never shot a healthy person before.

Ramsey’s finger on the trigger will feel as visceral as your own finger on the controller button if Mazin and Druckmann have accomplished what they set out to do. We wouldn’t have more than a century of great movie history if there wasn’t power in witnessing angst throw a shadow across an actor’s face; it may be impossible to duplicate exactly.

Ramsey’s finger on the trigger will feel as visceral as your own finger on the controller button if Mazin and Druckmann have accomplished what they set out to do. Although it may be impossible to duplicate the exact same emotion, we wouldn’t have more than a century of rich cinematic history if there weren’t power to be found in watching angst cast a shadow across an actor’s face.