HBO: The Last of Us

[ironwez20]

...What?

Sometimes I think he’s very high when he post. He leaves me very confused with his replies

 

[Sidewinder]

I hope it's good. Halo sucked!

 

[Johnny Utah]

Empire gives it 5 stars.

'Comfortably the best adaptation of a video-game ever made: one that deepens the game’s dystopian lore, while staying true to its emotional core. Like the game, it’s a masterpiece, too.'
https://www.empireonline.com/tv/reviews/the-last-of-us/

 

[Rayman]

Empire gives it 5 stars.

'Comfortably the best adaptation of a video-game ever made: one that deepens the game’s dystopian lore, while staying true to its emotional core. Like the game, it’s a masterpiece, too.'
https://www.empireonline.com/tv/reviews/the-last-of-us/

 

[chrisstbh]

Empire gives it 5 stars.

'Comfortably the best adaptation of a video-game ever made: one that deepens the game’s dystopian lore, while staying true to its emotional core. Like the game, it’s a masterpiece, too.'
https://www.empireonline.com/tv/reviews/the-last-of-us/

Idk, I doubt it’s better than Sonic.

 

[R_R_X]

Idk, I doubt it’s better than Sonic.

I'm guessing they mean direct adaptations.

 

[Space Jockey]

Man that was a great review, very much looking forward to it.

 

[R_R_X]

All the praise aside I'm not too happy with some of the changes they're doing, like removing the spores, Sam being deaf, the hunters being humanized, they've hinted that Bill might possibly get a different outcome than the game and most importantly how some reviews mention there's very little violence and infected in the whole show which was something I was looking forward to seeing in live action.

Some of the reviews and comments from people like Craig Mazin come off as shallow when they praise this show up by knocking the games down for being a lesser medium, the comment about video game characters being just "pixels dying on the screen" and that therefore their deaths are not as impactful is hilariously out of touch considering how polarizing and shocking Joel's death still is to this day.

But I'm still going to be checking it out of course, I'm curious to see what new material they write for Joel and Ellie and the other characters and how they adapt some of my favorite parts from the games.

 

[Space Jockey]

Yeah Part II was brutal with the violence, more so than Part I, lack of it would impact it greatly if Part II was adapted. I guess we'll see if Part I is a PG-13 level of violence rather than an R.

 

[Dave_W]

Empire gives it 5 stars.

'Comfortably the best adaptation of a video-game ever made: one that deepens the game’s dystopian lore, while staying true to its emotional core. Like the game, it’s a masterpiece, too.'
https://www.empireonline.com/tv/reviews/the-last-of-us/

Idk, I doubt it’s better than Sonic.

Until Mario comes out! Waa-hoo!

 

[ironwez20]

Screw Mario !

 

[choombaz]

I’m surprised Empire didn’t let James Dyer review it, he’s the hardcore Last Of Us fan and he seen episodes since last year and has been champing at the embargo bit to burst out how much he adores it. Very excited for this and I haven’t even finished the game yet.

 

[R_R_X]

I’m surprised Empire didn’t let James Dyer review it, he’s the hardcore Last Of Us fan and he seen episodes since last year and has been champing at the embargo bit to burst out how much he adores it. Very excited for this and I haven’t even finished the game yet.

Finish the game as soon as you can, you owe it to yourself.

 

[MeatHookGekko]

All the praise aside I'm not too happy with some of the changes they're doing, like removing the spores, Sam being deaf, the hunters being humanized, they've hinted that Bill might possibly get a different outcome than the game and most importantly how some reviews mention there's very little violence and infected in the whole show which was something I was looking forward to seeing in live action.

Some of the reviews and comments from people like Craig Mazin come off as shallow when they praise this show up by knocking the games down for being a lesser medium, the comment about video game characters being just "pixels dying on the screen" and that therefore their deaths are not as impactful is hilariously out of touch considering how polarizing and shocking Joel's death still is to this day.

But I'm still going to be checking it out of course, I'm curious to see what new material they write for Joel and Ellie and the other characters and how they adapt some of my favorite parts from the games.

When you change mediums, the potential for the narrative to be very "shallow" is IMHO something that can get out of control very quickly.

Games are built around level design, quests, side quests, puzzles, interactivity with the environment. marathons to the next cut scene and practical mass combat mechanics. None of that really translates to long form storytelling like "prestige" television.

If you have Joel killing even 1/15th of the people he killed in TLOU P1, then he becomes the Terminator on screen. You can tell that kind of story, but then it can only work if it's something like satire/parody. The game requires a fast paced prologue to negate Joel's daughter and brother very quickly. In a show however, that has to change, to unwind the impact of what happened.

The bane of modern TV production is trying to set a foot hold into possible spin offs and anything else that can turn it into a full blown universe/franchise. It's not good enough for Echo to be a character in Hawkeye and leave it there, she needs to be there to create a back door pilot character for a totally new show. Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes, Taylor Sheridan and what's left of The Walking Dead TV universe. It's a pretty common strategy these days.

I don't believe any of the reviews. Both good and bad. For pretty much anything these days. All these pundits and sites are likely bought, bribed or leveraged in some way. I want to give this show a fair chance.

But yes, I get what some critics are saying but I find some of the context is usually left out. For example, in TLOU2, our protagonist stabs a woman in the throat. Then find out the woman was pregnant. Big shock, big horror. But it is muted if you consider our "hero" has absolutely slaughtered boatloads of people already. NPC's have a very limited utility in a format like movies or television. I suspect issues like that are what are seen as murky waters for the emotional resonance within the game's storytelling. I enjoyed TLOU P1, but I also personally concede that Druckmann is a hack. He uses cheap manipulation in his storytelling but many games do that. I loved Dishonored, but some of the plot devices were extremely manipulative. But they've got to keep up a pace that is not in line with how a TV show practically works.

I really liked Black Sails. I thought it was a great show. Not perfect but really well done. Most people have never seen it. Just like Penny Dreadful. If I listened to critics at the time, I might not have given Black Sails a chance. Professional critics or people on social media with large enough subscriber bases don't mean too much to me, I'll make up my own mind.

A lot of people see social media as more powerful than actual day to day reality. A few hundred people online with the loudest voices doesn't represent the entire potential viewer base.

 

[BeefEaster]

The spore thing doesn't really bother me. It never made much sense to begin with, how it was handled in the games. They go through an area with spores and then take their masks off and continue on like nothing happened despite their clothes and hair surely being saturated with them. They treat it more like a poison gas cloud than an airborne pathogen.

 

[R_R_X]

The spore thing doesn't really bother me. It never made much sense to begin with, how it was handled in the games. They go through an area with spores and then take their masks off and continue on like nothing happened despite their clothes and hair surely being saturated with them. They treat it more like a poison gas cloud than an airborne pathogen.

I mean the whole zombie concept doesn't make sense, the cordyceps was just a different and and more realistic approach to the genre but I doubt if that fungus was able to infect humans we would see them turn into ravenous zombies, besides modern scientists still haven't been able to engineer a vaccine for fungal infections so a doctor creating one with scarce resources and one immune subject 20 years into the apocalypse literally wouldn't work but somehow we're supposed to believe that would've 100% been possible.

So you see for me it was never about things making perfect sense in a video game but how the spores added something new to the genre, having the element of this threat not only being the infected people but a fungus that can take over entire buildings because of one host sprouting the spores into the air was genuinely terrifying because it's exatcly how the cordyceps works in real life with insects and their colonies and it made for the most unsettling and intense parts of the games.

The spores also play a part in key scenes of both games like Ellie revealing to Dina she's immune when they're down in the spore infested tunnels and her mask breaks, yeah it didn't make 100% scientific sense when you consider that they would still have spores attached to them but to me the alternative they went with in the show is even less believable, that being that all the infected are a hive mind and the "tendrils" basically work like a telepathic spider web so when a human steps on a tendril it will send out a signal to all infected in the vicinity to go infect the human, it's something straight out of a sci-fi movie and makes even less sense to me.

 

[R_R_X]

When you change mediums, the potential for the narrative to be very "shallow" is IMHO something that can get out of control very quickly.

Games are built around level design, quests, side quests, puzzles, interactivity with the environment. marathons to the next cut scene and practical mass combat mechanics. None of that really translates to long form storytelling like "prestige" television.

If you have Joel killing even 1/15th of the people he killed in TLOU P1, then he becomes the Terminator on screen. You can tell that kind of story, but then it can only work if it's something like satire/parody. The game requires a fast paced prologue to negate Joel's daughter and brother very quickly. In a show however, that has to change, to unwind the impact of what happened.

The bane of modern TV production is trying to set a foot hold into possible spin offs and anything else that can turn it into a full blown universe/franchise. It's not good enough for Echo to be a character in Hawkeye and leave it there, she needs to be there to create a back door pilot character for a totally new show. Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes, Taylor Sheridan and what's left of The Walking Dead TV universe. It's a pretty common strategy these days.

I don't believe any of the reviews. Both good and bad. For pretty much anything these days. All these pundits and sites are likely bought, bribed or leveraged in some way. I want to give this show a fair chance.

But yes, I get what some critics are saying but I find some of the context is usually left out. For example, in TLOU2, our protagonist stabs a woman in the throat. Then find out the woman was pregnant. Big shock, big horror. But it is muted if you consider our "hero" has absolutely slaughtered boatloads of people already. NPC's have a very limited utility in a format like movies or television. I suspect issues like that are what are seen as murky waters for the emotional resonance within the game's storytelling. I enjoyed TLOU P1, but I also personally concede that Druckmann is a hack. He uses cheap manipulation in his storytelling but many games do that. I loved Dishonored, but some of the plot devices were extremely manipulative. But they've got to keep up a pace that is not in line with how a TV show practically works.

I really liked Black Sails. I thought it was a great show. Not perfect but really well done. Most people have never seen it. Just like Penny Dreadful. If I listened to critics at the time, I might not have given Black Sails a chance. Professional critics or people on social media with large enough subscriber bases don't mean too much to me, I'll make up my own mind.

A lot of people see social media as more powerful than actual day to day reality. A few hundred people online with the loudest voices doesn't represent the entire potential viewer base.

I agree with most of what you said about the games but I'm not expecting Pedro Pascal to be murdering 10 red shirts each episode, what I wanted to see was brutal violence like you see in the game, when Joel shoots a hunter or infected at point blank range with a shotgun I want to see their face being blown apart and limbs getting torn to bits, hearing Ellie's reactions to Joel brutally murdering some guy paired with the graphic violence really drove home what kind of world they were living so I don't want every bit of violence to be muted or hidden like some of the reviews suggest.

I'm even more concerned about the lack of infected and the fungus itself which was a huge part of the first game and really drove home just how doomed the whole world was with the threat of the cordyceps around every corner, it made me understand why some people would be geniunely mad at Joel for selfishly taking away a possible cure but unfortunately it seems the show will be more in line with the second game where the infection is just a backdrop threat only used for big set pieces and "the real monsters are the humans" crap.

On a side note I loved Black Sails too.

 

[maalmurph]

I have a friend that’s been vehemently against the very idea of this show since its inception…so I’m sure he’ll be “hate watching” on Sunday just to prove himself right

 

[R_R_X]

The infected only appear briefly in 4 episodes...

Imo this completely defeats the purpose of the whole journey and the dilemma of the ending, if the world isn't absolutely teeming with infected and the cordyceps at every turn then why even bother with a vaccine when the humans are the biggest threat?

 

[Johnny Utah]

If they're used well it's no issue. The Alien wasn't exactly doing shots with Ripley on the Nostromo.