The Last of Us

Like everyone else in the cable-connected world, I dutifully tuned-in to The Last of Us, a limited series zombie movie on HBO.  The show is well-made with excellent acting, but it's also very sentimental in an unpleasant cloying manner and highly predictable -- whenever there's a pause in the grisly suspense, for instance, some off-hand and jocular patter between the characters, you can be assured that a monster is lurking nearby to attack or that a bomb will go off to punctuate the scene with with an overwrought explosion.  The formulaic path that zombie pictures utilize is so well-trodden as to be fundamentally inescapable and, certainly, in the show's last episodes, in particular, there's nothing new at all -- it's basically point-and-shoot gore with interludes of soppy emotion.   Furthermore, all plausibility goes out the window even within the conventions of the genre in the final few shows.  A glaring example is an extended massacre scene in which the hero murders dozens of adversaries using his rifle, a machine gun lifted from a corpse and, then, his trusty side-arm:  the good guy is invulnerable and his adversaries fire a thousand rounds without scathing him although all of his shots are dead-eye accurate and, at last, penetrating to the operating  room where his side-kick is about to have to her brain surgically harvested, the doctors seem to be surprised that the hero is at the their doorstep -- were they deaf, somehow, to the thunderous fusillade required to get the protagonist to them?  Similarly, in the penultimate episode, the heroine kills a bunch of cannibals and sets their cult-headquarters on fire -- the bad guys here are visualized as Latter-Day Saint cultists and Menschenfressers; the scriptwriters don't know what to do with the other thirty or so cult-members and, so, they remain conveniently off-screen during the mayhem, apparently oblivious to the enormous fiery conflagration.  Examples of this sort of lazy scriptwriting, gaps in narrative logic that wouldn't have been allowed in a Universal or RKO horror movie in the thirties or forties, can be multiplied but to what end?  It's a zombie picture and, by definition, idiotic.  

The premise seems copped from Guillermo del Toro's 2009 vampire series The Strain, also a show with a pseudo-scientific biological basis for the ravening monsters. Some sort of fungus spreads like a plague infecting human beings and turning them into hideous, mushroom-headed zombies.  Most of the zombies just lounge around waiting for someone to walk by so that they can rouse themselves from their vegetative stupor and eat that person.  Some of the zombies, however, are more predatory and run around with their rains exposed like so much caulifower or broccolini -- these are so-called "clickers" that hunt like bats by sonar (needless to say they make a clicking sound).  The movie is based on a Nintendo game and, so, as one can imagine, it's not too well thought out.  A lot of folks just turn into harmless morel slime.  However, a few of the zombies grow to impressive size, are buff with mushroom muscles, and seem to marshal armies of other fungus folk -- these are like the impressively malign "end-bosses" in old first-person shooters like Doom or Duke-Nuke-em, the towering spawn of hell who fight you in the last stages of these sorts of games.  The physiology, instinctual apparatus, and habits of the zombies are never convincingly established so that the scriptwriter can make the poor creatures do whatever he or she wants according to the exigencies of the narrative.  The zombies figure in the plot as nuisances, somewhat like marauding bears or lions.  The real villains are other humans who have degenerated after twenty years of battling the fungus-people into feral groups of raiders, sex cultists, and fanatical terrorists.  The government has established exclusion zones with walls to keep the the zombies out, but these havens are run by fascist paramilitaries who are under constant attack by the Fireflies, a group of insurgents who are constantly blowing things up for no good reason at all.  In the havens everything is grey, ruinous, with concentration-camp-like prisons.  The open terrain is full of cannibal outlaws and zombies who can apparently live forever except when they decompose into mildew.  Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is a teenage girl who is immune to the fungal virus.  The Fireflies think that she carries the secret to immunity against the fungus.  So the Fireflies (I think) need to protect the girl and send her West, possibly to Denver, where there is a hospital where she can be studied.  (The trek is pointless and I couldn't figure out its motivation other than as a narrative vehicle to get the principals into the scenic Canadian Rockies where half of the action takes place.)  Joe, a weary terrorist, is persuaded  by his girlfriend, to escort the girl on their journey across the country -- the show stars in an exclusion zone in Boston.  Joe (Pedro Pascal) is a cynical hard case, a bit like Shane or a hundred other heroes in old Westerns -- he's seen too much killing and just wants to take his ease and, of course, his perception of humankind's virtues has been pretty much degraded by all the mayhem in which he's participated  Shortly after Joe and his girlfriend with Ellie in tow venture out of the walls of the exclusion zone the girlfriend gets offed -- I think a zombie eats her.  Joe resents being saddled with the foul-mouthed teenage girl but he feels the need to continue the venture that was plotted by his deceased girlfriend and, of course, gradually bonds with the young woman to the point that, in the last episode, he is willing to go to hell and back to rescue her, murdering legions of hapless enemies along the way.  The first half of the series features gritty urban combat; the second half of the show is a large-scale Western filmed in snowy wilderness with protagonists riding horses across the open range.  It's all reasonably exciting in a mindless way and there is a lot of speechifying -- in the last half of the show, in particular, bad guys tend to engage in harangues on  Nietzschean themes, with the effect that the good guys generally have opportunities to recover from their wounds, escape from detention, and slaughter the villains who have  lost their advantages due to their penchant for excessive oratory.  

The zombie film is pretty much exhausted in terms of its thematic impact although The Last of Us exploits the COVID crisis for some of its imagery and features an elaborate flashback structure.  The action taking place in 2023 continuously reverts to 2002 when the fungal infection caused the apocalypse to occur, more or less, overnight.  The show innovates by indulging in several gay-themed subplots.  In the second (and longest) episode, two gay men make a life for themselves in a fortified compound surviving in happy marital bliss for twenty years before opting out of the monster-haunted world by way of a suicide pact.  This episode, very moving and well done, has nothing to do with the rest of the show but it establishes the HBO series' bona fides with respect to high seriousness (purportedly) and politically correct virtue-signaling.  Later, in the film there's a Lesbian recapitulation of these themes when Ellie falls in love with a comely girl, tours a ruinous mall with her,  the whole thing ending in an utterly predictable way when a zombie eats Ellie's girlfriend and turns her into one of the fungus-people.  These love affairs are depicted with copious, if effective, emotion and are intended to show that the series is something more and better than a point-and-shoot bloodbath.  The show's other innovation is the peculiar appearance of its leading lady; Bella Ramsey is not conventionally attractive and it's probably not gallant to remark that she is, in fact, ugly and strange-looking -- her impassive pale face with its little eyes and flat nose is a special effect in itself.  In the end, Joe and Ellie finally reach their destination.  Joe gets his side pierced, a bit like Jesus Christ, by a dagger-like broken bottle.  While Joe is in a coma, Ellie gets captured by cannibals but slaughters most of them, including the vicious preacher who is the patriarch of the cult.  (Just as homosexuals can be reliably predicted to be kindly, virtuous, and loving in this show, Christian fundamentalists, in an equally predictable way, are portrayed as Bible-banging rapist-cannibals -- this is a typical Hollywood response to conservatives  of any kind.)  Somehow Joe recovers from death's door, delivering Ellie to the hospital where, of course, the evil medical professionals decide to harvest her brain.  (She's got immunity we learn because her mother was bit by zombie while literally giving birth and this somehow has provided Ellie with her imperviousness to the fungus -- possibly via breast milk or the umbilicus.)  Joe, then, kills everyone in sight, rendering the entire trek across the country completely pointless and ineffectual.  He and Ellie make their way to a commune where Joe's brother lives in a spectacular valley in the High Country and, so, on this positive note, the series ends -- although, of course, only temporarily.  Presumably, the program will be back in a year or two for a second season.