The humour is far wanted within the bleak, violent world that they traverse, the place individuals are simply as harmful because the contaminated. The online game, which is cut up into 4 seasons throughout a 12 months, is episodic in nature, with most places that includes a sub-plot sketched out in letters and mementos that the participant finds. The present builds upon these letters and fleshes them out into fully-formed tales. And it’s right here, when Druckmann and Mazin are at their most audacious by way of artistic licence, that The Final of Us really sings as tv.
Episode three, for instance, turns a sequence of bitter letters between two males known as Invoice and Frank (implied to be lovers) into essentially the most tender of romances. Set throughout 20 years, it follows paranoid prepper Invoice (Nick Offerman) as he strikes up a relationship with Frank (The White Lotus’ Murray Bartlett), a person who stumbles into certainly one of his many traps. What follows is an attractive, exquisitely carried out exploration of The Final of Us’ central theme: that the ashes of the world are sufficient, so long as there may be somebody to dwell for amongst them.
It’s a sentiment that’s turned inside-out in episodes 4 and 5, which comply with Joel and Ellie as they make their approach by way of the aftermath of a bloody rebellion in opposition to an particularly fascistic department of FEDRA in Kansas Metropolis. The excellent Melanie Lynskey (Yellowjackets) options right here because the chillingly violent and vengeful chief of the revolution. She needs all collaborators executed, with a particular emphasis on a person known as Henry (Lamar Johnson), who murdered her brother. These episodes additionally characteristic among the present’s finest motion sequences, together with an enormous set-piece involving the contaminated that’s as grisly and gripping as any within the sport.
It’s not an ideal adaptation. There are specific scenes early on that really feel too gamey for tv (equivalent to these the place Joel and Ellie are sneaking round a museum), whereas the latter half of the sequence feels prefer it wants yet another episode to even out the tempo (scenes involving the contaminated are surprisingly scarce past episode 5). There may be additionally the truth that no on-screen adaptation of The Final of Us will ever really seize what makes the supply materials so fascinating: to be immersed in that world, to luxuriate in areas that really feel haunted by absence, to be eaten alive by a Clicker.
And but, it does not really feel even remotely controversial to name this the perfect online game adaptation ever made. For followers of the sport, it’s an adaptation of the utmost talent and reverence, but one nonetheless able to shock; for individuals who have by no means picked up a controller, it’s an encapsulation of the sport’s coronary heart and soul – its full-blooded characters, its neat plotting, its mature themes of affection and loss. It’s, to complete Ellie’s joke, “excellent in its subject”.
★★★★☆
The Final of Us premieres on 15 January on HBO within the US and 16 January on Sky Atlantic and NOW within the UK
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