by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $16.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, Isabela Merced, Kaitlin Dever, Catherine O’Hara
Intro:
… a great beginning for this new season.
HBO’s The Last of Us didn’t so much break the video game adaptation curse as shove a switchblade right into its jugular. The original game was narrative-driven, and the show not only managed to maintain everything that made that story so compelling (the multi-faceted characters, the eerie locations, the nuanced approach to a survival narrative), it elevated them beyond what the game was capable of conveying. The ‘Uncharted but zombie apocalypse’ gameplay is still pretty damn good … but to experience one of the best video game narratives yet penned, the first season is the ideal way to do it.
With streaming service Max finally making it to Aussie screens, we’ve been given a look at the first episode of the second season: Future Days.
Right from the start, it’s clear that showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are holding true to their plans of adapting The Last of Us Part II across multiple seasons. Without getting into direct spoilers, Future Days focuses on events that are alluded to in dialogue during the game’s prologue, meaning that this isn’t even really the start of the story as long-time fans know it. We catch up with Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) five years after the haunting conclusion of the first season, while also being introduced to Dina (Isabela Merced) and, much more briefly, Abby (Kaitlin Dever).
As foundation building for the story to come, it certainly has all the right pieces in place. Ellie’s budding relationship with Dina, even in this embryonic stage, lives up to the promise of two actresses this freaking talented working together, and Pascal fits into this older and even more troubled Joel just as well as his younger counterparts. A key moment with him opposite Catherine O’Hara deals directly with the themes of forgiveness and the cycle of violence that made the source game so compelling, and true to form, they’re already being meaningfully expanded upon here. That magic touch from season one is still evident, which is a great sign.
However, the extent to which this episode focuses directly on the drama ends up making its sole sequence involving the Cordyceps feel like it’s here by obligation rather than immediate gratification. The characters are consistently the best thing about this franchise, but both the games and the show can get terrifying when they catch the feeling. And true, the encounter in this episode lives up to the series standard, but it mainly exists just to hint at later developments, like something that needed to be here as a reminder of ‘oh yeah, fungus zombies’. In comparison with the instantly investable Ellie and Dina, this and even the cold opening with Abby are more promise than reward in the moment, which is a little off-putting.
But not nearly enough, because this is still a great beginning for this new season. The production values are top-notch, the returning faces are as aggressively watchable as ever, and the newcomers, for the most part, instantly click with their surrounding cast. Even with that lingering sensation that it’s going to take a while to get the full story going forward, there’s also a sense that taking their time with this could actually pay off, between the steadily-building stakes from this first episode, and the still-astonishing character work both written and performed. Getting to see Bella Ramsey and Isabela Merced be cute together feels like reason enough to stick with this all on its own, with the compelling everything-else just making that deal all the sweeter.
