With
Game of Thrones
, HBO had shown that a television series could take on and sublimate works of fantasy, the magnitude of which seemed to require the big screen.
By adapting the cult post-apocalyptic video game
The Last of Us
, the American channel achieved the same miracle and signed the best transposition of the controller to fiction, breaking a glass ceiling at the same time.
Forget the disastrous
Halo
of Paramount+, overtaken the cinema turnips To
mb Raider
and
Uncharted
.
This nine-episode series, which traces the dangerous journey of a smuggler and a young girl in an America plagued by the living dead, will punctuate Amazon Prime Video Mondays for two months.
Following the end of the contract between HBO and OCS, the merchant site temporarily recovers the catalog of the broadcaster.
With
The Last of Us
, HBO has set its sights on one of the most successful game franchises, which has sold 37 million copies since 2013.
The proofreading was entrusted to Craig Mazin, the scriptwriter of the chilling
Chernobyl
, who retraced the events that led to the nuclear disaster of 1986. He also shows a rare fidelity to the game.
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Sequences are repeated shot by shot, but it also inscribes this odyssey in the convulsions of our news.
Mazin retains the singularity of the saga: a story of survival and shootings in which family and friendly ties are central.
The dystopia it creates makes sense even to those who have never played.
The Covid having been there, the result is as frightening as
The Handmaid's Tale.
Contaminated Hordes
This intelligence appears from the opening scene.
In the 1970s, scientists debate on a television set, cigarettes in hand, the probability of a devastating pandemic.
But rather than warning about viruses, one of the participants cites fungi.
What would happen if one of these parasites, which strike insects, adapted to global warming and managed to survive in the human body?
The prophecy comes true one day in September 2003. Hours after unexplained riots in Jakarta, citizens all over the world attack their neighbors and bite them, turning them into zombies.
This is the great collapse.
The governments bombard the metropolises to slow down the progression of the evil.
The army executes en masse without worrying about tracking down the populations.
Seventy percent of humanity perishes.
The survivors hide in fortified city centers or in the countryside.
In this chaos, Joel (Pedro Pascal,
The Mandalorian
) loses his daughter.
Twenty years later, the bereaved father has become a smuggler.
He agrees to transport Ellie (Bella Ramsey, Game of Thrones) to a laboratory at the other end of the country.
Bitten, the orphaned teenager has not developed any symptoms and could be the key to a vaccine.
To arrive safely, they will have to trust each other and cross ghost towns avoiding looters and hordes of contaminated, whose heads recall the portraits of Arcimboldo.
In form and substance,
The Last of Us
is astonishing, without sinking into the hemoglobin escalation of
The Walking Dead
.
Cars abandoned by the side of the road, buildings in ruins… Time is suspended, frozen.
Not a surface that isn't covered in moss.
The series abandons the point of view of its central duo to dare decisive narrative detours.
The third episode tells how a conspiratorial survivalist collects a survivor.
Outside of all civilization, the two men reconstruct it through music and cooking.
And find love in each other's arms that would have been impossible before.
That's the beauty of The Last of Us: searching for the last spark of humanity, the need for connection, the tiniest hope even in the most opaque darkness.
The series, which captivated nearly 5 million Americans (HBO's biggest launch score behind
House of the Dragon
), delivers both incredible adrenaline and tears of compassion.