Alone and Forsaken, by Fate and by Man

HBO's adaptation of The Last of Us has been a cultral touchstone for a couple months, on the tip of tongues in lunchrooms, a subject of conversation across social media, with critical acclaim comporable to the adjulation heaped upon the souce game back in 2013. I enjoyed it, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have greviances. To qualify all statements following, I think the show is good. Great, even. A triumph in the endevour of adapting video game to motion picture- although, not the first such example despite what many clickbaiting thinkpieces would have you believe. My issues basically boil down to a handful of points; a disregard of action, additions made beyond the source material, truncation of the story, and a spoon feeding of interpretation to the audience. As such, I will address each individually. There is an amount of overlap between, but I'll weave it together somehow, just give me a minute.

There will be spoilers, by the by. It's been a minute, you've had time to see it.

I. WHERE HAVE ALL THE GUNS GONE?

The Last of Us is an action game. An action game with stealth sequences and a heavy narrative focus, but an action game at it's core. HBO's adaptation nails the story, with excellent performances from The Mandalorian and Lyanna Mormont, but despite it's lofty themes and the mature subject matter handled in the 9 episode run, it delivers a decidedly PG-13 level of combat. Executions, upon rare instances of their occurance, are delivered out of frame or with a quick cut away. The fungal zombies ("infected", if you will), established well in the first two episodes as the primary threat of the world and cause of the apocalypse we are taken along into, could charitably be described as recurring guest stars, the only real large scale encounter with them occuring toward the end of episode 5. From then on out, if an infected is shown, it is alone, and more often than not, in a flashback sequence. For the most part, this can be chalked up to budget restraints that play a considerable deciding role in a live action programme in stark opposition to a video game, but without their presence felt, this may as well have been taking place in a post-nuclear world for all the impact they have. At the onset of our journey, after giving us some world-building backstory, our antagonist, Joel, is made out to be a bit of a hard edged killer. Capable, and deadly. By the end of episode 8, we've had as many big shoot-outs as we've had episodes with Joel on his back bleeding out. There is something to be said for how repetitive it would be to put every action sequence of the game 1:1 onto the screen, and that the central drama of Joel and Ellie's journey should be the focus, as it was, but it leaves me feeling wanting for a scene with a shrapnel grenade made out of that Beefaroni can.

II. CUTTING MEANS SHIPPING

Leading directly off the previous point, there is only so much one can fit inside a 9 episode miniseries, so the discussion must be had on the creative level to decide what makes the cut and what does not. The story of the game has, more or less, made it to the screen unmolested but lacking space to breathe. I've come to accept the days of 26 episode seasons are dead and buried, but even an extra hour dedicated to the journey would have made the destination more poignent. The finale, I feel, is a perfect encapsulation of this problem. Every story beat is hit and rattled through in a quick and clean 40 odd minutes. This is made extra frustrating with episode 3 being an entirely tangental (sweet and poetic, but tangental) love story, and episode 7 serving as an adaptation of the Left Behind DLC for original game. Episode 7 being more excusable as a backstory episode for Ellie, as episode 1 was a backstory episode for Joel, but out of a 9 hour run, you're left with precious little of our duo's cross country escapades.

III: GONE TOO FAR, IN A COUPLE OF PLACES

I'm going to cut the shit here and be direct. The finale really pissed me off. Twice. These instances are what I'm directly referring to in 'non source material additions' and 'interpretation spoon feeding'. First off, the opening sequence to the finale showing Ellie's birth. Totally unnecessary, takes screen time away from the hospital sequence, and cheapens Ellie's character by completely demystifying her immunity. Bullshit. Should not have been written, filmed, or included in the final cut. Get rid of it. Second, the entirity of the hospital shootout was horrible, and it falls entirely on how it was shot and edited together. The slow motion, the extreme closeups, the melodramatic music, and aforementioned PG-13 violence, spells out plainly to the viewing audience a message that this is bad, Joel is in the wrong. Personal opinion nonwithstanding, I'm not even saying he isn't, but as an action sequence in-game, you as the player are the one gunning down the Fireflies, and are therefore put upon to weigh the morality of Joel's actions. In presenting it as they did, the show is leading the viewer to draw a specific conclusion. To reiterate once again, The Last of Us is an action game. There is no catharsis in slow motion footage of cartridge shells bouncing off a tile floor. I don't know if the showrunners thought it would have been gratuitous, or what, but I felt robbed of a true rendition of the climactic gameplay moments.

That's it, that's all I've got. Guess I didn't have as much to say about it as I thought I did.

Ticking away the moments that make up the dull day

There is a trend, in what I suppose I would call the 'new media' landscape, of beginning a sentence with the word "So". Be it Youtube, Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, or wheresoever one might be inclined upon spewing what constitutes a thought into the preceptive field of another. Why is that? Verbal crutch? An implication of casuality as to preemptively defend oneself from appearing to give a squirt of piss, lest they be challenged? Or is it a signifier of sheepishness? Lacking the confidence to jump directly into the thrust of an idea? I don't know where I'm going with this, but it's the sort of thing you begin to notice and will bother you for the rest of your life.

Anywho. Been a minute, eh?

Once upon a time, there was more than one post on this blog. Can't for the life of me remember how many, but I know for certain there was an embarassingly poorly written review of Duke Nukem 3D Megaton Edition from when that came out. I also can't really remember when I decided to glass the entire thing. Probably for the best. I don't intend to spend any amount of time waxing poetic about what's come between 2011 and now in my life, other than to say I had an inspiration to write, thought about posting it on Tumblr, thought better of it, remembered that I had a blogspot account, tried going to Blogspot, was redirected to Google, and had a hell of a time figuring out how to find my way back to this damn thing. But I'm here now, and I put a new banner up. Good lord, look at this old one;

Terrible indeed. Just a bunch of shit I thought was cool slapped around Impact font text. I had a motif going with the multicoloured D20's between a couple different pages I was running at the time, which I only remember because the Tumblr I use as a depository for my art still has one of them. Look at me, said I wasn't going to wax poetic and then went right to it. Moving on.

THE THING I WANTED TO WRITE ABOUT:

Illustration titled "The Commander Keens", originally found on DeviantART, is a band logo from untold years ago and cannot relocate the source of. Sincere apologies to the artist.

Back in 2019, Bethesda Softworks, riding high off the success of DOOM 4, and the rebooted Wolfenstein series, announced a new Commander Keen. Shock and awe! Except, it was a shovelware iphone game with graphics suited to a children's flash animated web series. Boo and hiss! Didn't take long for a sizable amount of backlash to head their way. Hard to verify now, but I recall the announcement trailer had something akin to a 1-1000 like/dislike ratio on YouTube. Fans of the original games voicing their distaste, or the uninitiated voicing their lack of interest? In either case, after that fateful E3 there was never another word from Bethesda about it. The 'GoKeen.com' URL from the trailer redirects you wholly unceremoniously to the Bethesda homepage, and it's fairly clear that they'd rather we all simply forget about it. That being the case, why mention it at all? It was four years ago, after all.

Well, that's just it. That was four years ago. Ne'er a mention of the series made again outside a few references in DOOM 5. They went on to shit out Mighty DOOM, a shovelware mobile game based on DOOM which, with two recent blockbuster titles under it's storied belt, can weather the hit to its reputation. But nothing for ol' Billy Blaze. A character who, one could convincingly argue, was the Mario of DOS, languishes in obscurity, and I just don't get why. Clearly they have the means to produce something with the character, they intended to do so, and one can assume from the reaction they got from the mobile game announcement that there has to be some kind of audience with some kind of expectations for what that should look like. Neo-3D Realms at the very least produced Rad Rogers as something of a spirtual sequel to that early 90s DOS platforming genre. It was kinda shit, but so is everything else they've made. If Nintendo can put out four New Super Mario Bros titles, one would think that the guys raking in money off six trillion Skyrim re-releases might see their way to knocking out a sidescrolling action game. Wishful thinking, I guess.

That's about all I got at the moment. Maybe I'll make a habit of writing here. Maybe not. If, for some godforsaken reason, you've managed to stumble your way onto this post and know who I am, or don't know who I am for that matter, I have a proper website now. Well, a dot com, at least. Had it for the better part of a decade, actually. You can find it, and by extension, me, at https://www.KaijuTurtle.com . It's basically a directory of links to profiles I have on other sites. Going back to that notion of habitually posting here, perhaps I will add a link to this page in time. Wouldn't that be novel?

In the meantime, Keep your stick on the ice.