I should have known better when I raved about HBO’s zombie thriller, The Last of Us, in a past article. There’s a rule yet to be denied: post-apocalyptic media is best in small doses, and it peaks at the beginning. It doesn’t matter if the show has Pedro Pascal as a lead, HBO’s special-effects capabilities, and decent writers — the most compelling minutes will always and forever be those of weathering the initial fall of civilization and then the first minutes peeking out of the hole after the horde has moved on.
Full credit to Armond White’s recent review of The Last of Us for its cold shower.
Armond writes:
The Last of Us flatters the specious assertion that television drama has advanced beyond movies, but that’s no more than the preference of a couch potato, validated by the guilt and desperation that the Covid lockdowns stoked. Bingeing habits prevent HBO superfans from recognizing that the show is inferior to the cinematic achievements it rips off. It lacks the vision of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and the insight of Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad.
Armond’s thesis that television attempts what has been done better in film brained me. In my original review, I mentioned that Lord of the Rings is the pinnacle of fantasy as Dune is to science fiction. I wondered if The Last of Us could be the same for post-apocalyptic fiction. But the crown jewel of this genre already exists, and it’s Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Jason Lee Steorts has a fabulous piece about Cormac McCarthy’s writings in the most recent magazine, and his words recalled the superiority of The Road’s exhaustion with the end of all things but its refusal to lose the last hope.
Jason writes:
Readers sometimes debate what are the moral economy and theology of McCarthy’s novels. Are they nihilist? I don’t think so. There is too consistently some candleflame of intelligent gentleness refusing to gutter in the dark . . .
Indeed.
The second the Last of Us writers try to make us prioritize petty backstories and intrahuman confrontations when there are legions of carbuncular homicidal demon-spawn roaming the map, the limitations on imagination and the need to buy time for set pieces become apparent. With seven of the first season’s nine episodes released, there are a full two that are consumed by homosexual melodrama — and unflattering melodrama at that. Indeed, it seems to the viewer as if both relationships originate in circumstance (pragmatic bisexuality) more than they do from any deep-seated desire. The first is a male prison romance; the second is a girlish prison romance — sexual needs fulfilled by the nearest warm, friendly, similar body.
The romantic asides aside, in the five episodes where things happen, most of them concern the politics of “safe zones” wherein the residents vie for power between rebel groups and FEDRA, a holdover federal emergency military government. No faction is compelling, with leaders acting like Mad Max villains on quaaludes. The self-described communists of the West introduce us to some eyerolling political philosophizing, but our time with them is blessedly short — a high-plains mirage of communal living.
By tarrying on, The Last of Us reveals itself to be just another zombie flick stretched out on a rack — self-indulgent entertainment. It thinks too much of itself and has hung on long enough for us to see the corpse-bloat build. But McCarthy already perfected the genre, so all The Last of Us needs to do is provide ghastly intrigue.