The Last Of Us Remastered (PS4) – creator and writer Craig Mazin previously got flack for calling The Last Of Us the ‘greatest story that has ever been told in video games’ (pic: Sony)
The infected from The Last Of Us have seen a rework for the TV show for the sake of realism and so the actors don’t have to wear gas masks.
One recurring issue for movie and TV adaptations of video games is that they often barely resemble their source material. Changes are necessary for adaptations, but there are plenty of examples of video game movies that come across as being embarrassed of their source material.
Things have undeniably improved in recent years, but even popular adaptations like Netflix’s Castlevania and the live action Sonic The Hedgehog movies aren’t one-to-one recreations of the games they’re based on.
The same will apparently be true of the upcoming The Last Of Us TV show. While it so far looks to be very authentic to the game, creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin have since revealed that they have fundamentally changed how the infected work.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the games, the infected are essentially zombies. They look and act like the undead but their concept is based on a real type of parasitic fungus called Cordyceps, that infects insects – with the game featuring a mutated version that can infect humans as well.
Despite its real world inspirations, it sounds like Druckmann and Mazin still felt the concept wasn’t grounded enough (at least as grounded as a mutant mushroom outbreak can be) and decided to rethink how the Cordyceps infection would work.
‘We wanted to ground this show in as much science as possible. The game did it pretty darn well, especially for a genre where it would be easy to say, ‘Oh, there’s zombies, but the zombies come out of the ground,’ said Mazin in a recent Collider interview.
‘Cordyceps is a fascinating concept, and it’s absolutely real. We wanted to push that a little further. We wanted to give us much reality as we could because the realer that is, the more we connect to the characters that are in that space playing around.’
While they didn’t go to deep into the specifics, it appears that the original method of infection is the primary change. In the game, the infection spread through spores in the air, which prompts the characters to wear gas masks in certain sections.
Instead, it seems like the TV show will see the infected use tendrils to latch onto people.
‘The game had spores in the air and people had to wear gas masks, and we decided, early on, that we didn’t wanna do that for the show,’ said Druckmann.
‘Eventually, those conversations led us to these tendrils. And then, just thinking about how there’s a passage that happens from one infected to another, and like fungus does, it could become a network that is interconnected. It became very scary to think that they’re all working against us in this unified way, which was a concept that I really liked, that got developed in the show.’
Would gas masks really have affected the show’s quality? (pic: HBO MAX/PLANET PHOTOS)
Druckmann doesn’t explain why they didn’t want the actors to be wearing gas masks, but if it’s to make sure you can see the actors’ faces then, as the co-director of both titles, he knows fine well that they’re rarely used in either game.
Plus, there are types of gas masks that don’t obscure your face that they could have opted to use instead.
Mazin suggests that the change to the infected ties into the overall themes of the show, saying ‘There is a character from the game that has a very interesting point of view about the fungus and his observation of Cordyceps that ties into some of the larger themes about what the show is about, and strangely enough, that ties into the notion of the beauty and potential danger of love.
‘Part of what Neil and I wanted to do was just make sure that everything in our story that we built here, as it was inspired by and adapted from the work that he did on the game, ultimately feeds back into the thing that matters the most for us, and that is Joel and Ellie’s relationship.’
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Why they deem tendrils to be more realistic than spores is unclear but it seems a very arbitrary change, and one that’s bound to generate a lot of unnecessary fan argument.
Mazin’s earlier statement, that ‘the realer that is, the more we connect to the characters’ is also peculiar since there are an infinite number of unrealistic stories that feature characters audiences can connect with and relate to.
After all, co-lead Pedro Pascal stars in a hit show in a completely unrealistic universe, where no-one ever sees his face. The insistence that the infected aren’t really zombies also seems an odd stance to take, considering they are in all but the details.
The first episode of The Last Of Us airs on HBO this Sunday on January 15, although there’s no word on when it will become available in the UK.
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The infected from The Last Of Us have seen a rework for the TV show for the sake of realism and so the actors don’t have to wear gas masks.
