Burt Reynolds has to escort Ellie so that she can save humankind, but danger lurks everywhere.
The first season of The Last of Us consists of 9 episodes. I have never played the games, but I am going to soon.
So the first season is based on the first game where we follow Burt Reynolds, who is escorting and protecting a girl named Ellie. She is immune to the dangerous fungus that infects people. So off they go, and they will be in grave danger from the start to the end of their journey.
I do not give a flying fish about the original material like other nerds do. I am tired of saying it, but I want the movie or series to engage me with the story it tells and what happens on the journey. So even if I had played the games, I would not have yelled out that they did this and that wrong because it did not happen in the game. As long as the storytelling is good and engaging, I do not give a flying fish. Comprende?
The first episodes are not good. You get a cheap feeling of the series since the characters spend a lot of their time indoors, and I could not stand Bella Ramsey. Had this series been made 13 years ago or so, Ellen Page would have been perfect in this role.
But Bella Ramsey grew on me after 5 episodes, especially when she sees the real and dangerous world. The journey opens up her eyes, and she has to adapt to survive. She gets quieter, and with that, she is nowhere near as irritating as she was in the first episodes. I could not stand her role interpretation in the first episodes. Bella Ramsey felt so old behaving like a teenager. So I would have preferred a much younger actor who looks like she is 14 years old and not 25. Yeah, I know she is 19, but she still looks like she is 25.
Pedro Pascal as Burt Reynolds is solid as a Terminator, but he is not an emotional actor. He and Bella Ramsey do not have much chemistry in the first five-six episodes, but after something happens to him, you feel they bond more because of what they have experienced so far. But the emotional bond between them that I expected the series would create, never happens.
I am not a fan of the episodes where the characters spend a lot of their time indoors. Then you get the cheap TV series feeling, and I cannot stand it. It gets much better when they are outdoors; that is when the journey becomes more suspenseful, and you feel that there are not many people left in the world.
But I cannot say that much is happening in The Last of Us. This is first and foremost a story about a girl and Burt Reynolds who are bonding. Emotionally there is not much here because the actors never manage to create believable emotional chemistry. Except for the episode with the two gay characters. But that episode did not feel like it belonged in this series, and I do not care if it is in the game or not. Do you hear me? But that episode had the emotional impact I thought Ellie and Joel would create on this journey. But no, they are nowhere near reaching that goal.
There are a few weak and boring episodes, and that is a disappointment when the first season has just 9 episodes. The episode with Ellie and her best friend is so boring, and I wish they never made that episode. But the episode with the nice man who tries to help Ellie is awesome. I am talking about the scene in the forest.
The first season of The Last of Us is all over the place with the quality and pacing. I know the hype the first season got, but that is just nonsense. This is not a masterpiece; don’t fall for that. This is nowhere near the best TV season ever created.
The story is pretty thin, and I am certain that the game is much better than this season since it is a different and more intense experience. The series never delivers a real and deep emotional impact. It lacks the feeling of being on a real outside adventure where the world has gone to hell. There are a lot of things this season could have learned from The Walking Dead, well, the first seven seasons.
I expected a bigger world and better chemistry between the leading actors. But after a weak start, the quality gets better in the last four episodes. So it is a season worth watching, but you have to lower your expectations a lot. And there are not many infected encounters in the series either. That took me by surprise, but it did not bother me since this is a series that focuses on the bonding between a teenager and a burn-out, Burt Reynolds, who is a stone-cold killer in The Last of Us.