Video game

HBO Is Making a ‘Last of Us’ Show. But Just Let Video Games Be Video Games. – Esquire.com


It’s no industry secret that video game movies suck. Since the 1980s, giant movie studios have tried to capitalize on the popularity of longstanding game series like Tomb Raider, Assassins Creed, and Resident Evil. We don’t even need to mention the Mario Bros. movie to convince you that adapting these interactive titles with all their jumping, shooting, and power-up-grabbing characters to the multiplexes just doesn’t work. Sure, some people seemed to like the recent Sonic movie. Me…well, I’d get into it, but I’m afraid the Sonic fans might come after me again.

For years, there’s been talk of making a movie out of the 2013 Naughty Dog zombie game, The Last of Us. The title–which does not star Ellen Page, despite the lookalike main character, Ellie–is about two people trying to survive in a post-infection civilization. One of them, the Ellie character, seems to bear the cure to the infection (she’s immune). Joel, a sort of Hugh-Jackman-in-Logan type (which no doubt was inspired by this game), will stop at nothing to get this little girl to the research center where they can extract the antidote. He shoots a lot of shotguns and snaps a lot of necks along the way. It’s really scary. And it made me cry.

Yesterday, HBO announced that it would be adapting the apocalyptic action-thriller as a television series with the dudes behind Chernobyl at the helm. Sure, that makes sense–the somber survival game is structured in chapters (summer, fall, winter, and spring), and since it’s already so noticeably influenced by cinema (this game is like, the cinematic game), it’d be only natural to tell that story as a television series.

But Last of Us is already a fantastic movie. And it’s made all the more better by the fact that you can interact with the characters in the film. Why can’t video games just be video games?

Since the mainstream conception of games is still stuck somewhere in the early 2000s GTA era (they’ll melt your brain!), the idea of bringing a game to the sacred cinema screen or to the hollowed grounds of the HBO Sunday Evening Programming slot seems like an elevation–a gesture of legitimization. It’s as if movie producers are saying, “Here, gamers, we’ll take your silly little pew-pew game and make it into art.” And sure, a lot of people are going to say that The Last of Us is the perfect game to be made into a movie. Maybe it is! But to me, that’s kind of like saying “Hey Jude” would be better without the piano. You’re losing the best part!

Let me describe for you the experience of playing Last of Us. I played through it for the first time pretty recently, in fact. I came home one evening around 1 a.m., a little cold, a little foggy from some drinks. I tucked into bed, turned on my PS4, and dipped into the sewers in Last of Us. Alone in my apartment, I listened to Joel–still mourning the loss of someone very special to him (I won’t ruin it for you)–begin to let his guard down in front of Ellie, this plucky little girl with the sunniest disposition in the worst possible time. A zombie bursts out from the grimy waters, and then another, and another. We start running. These zombies are fast. And when you die in Last of Us, you really die. Those things eat out your neck. It’s horrific. A big one dropped into the water–a bloater, as Joel calls them–and he starts throwing these infectious pods at me. My heart’s racing in my apartment; I’m totally transported here. Hours pass. It’s 3 a.m. I turn the game off but I’m too scared to go to sleep. Damn.

At just about 50 years old, games are barely out of the silent era, relatively speaking. But the folks telling stories in this medium are onto something special. So special, in fact, that games like Red Dead Redemption 2 have clocked in with bigger opening weekends than even the best-selling Marvel movies. Game developers aren’t celebrities like filmmakers. You don’t see them on talk shows or being interviewed on NPR. But the people behind these things, they’re artists. You can live inside these games. If you think they’re just for kids, you’re not just wrong–you’re missing out.

The way I see it, there are a few basic elements of storytelling that are shared between mediums. Books have words. Music has sound. Paintings have picture. When you get to film, you have the combination of all three–cinema professors will say “time” instead of “words,” describing cinema as the combination picture, sound, and time. When you carry literature into film, you’re actually adding new elements to the work. Same with comic books–you’re bringing “time” into the mix, bringing still imagery to life. That all works, because it’s a process of addition. Games, though, they already have all the elements of film. But they have a fourth element–gameplay. So whenever you bring a game back down into movies or television, it’s actually a process of subtraction. That’s not to say it can’t ever be done–I’m sure we’ll get a great video game movie someday. But to me, The Last of Us is already perfect as it is. And if I really wanted to see Joel and Ellie together onscreen again, I could just replay Last of Us, which got remastered for the PS4 in 2014.

Or, I could just wait until May, when Last of Us 2 comes out. Hell, it already looks like it could be one of the best video games–no, stories–in years.



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