The Last of Us review
It’s difficult to critique HBO’s The Last of Us without first acknowledging the difficulty of critiquing HBO’s The Last of Us. You’ll likely know by now that the series is an adaptation of writer Neil Druckmann’s award-winning video game of the same name, a third-person PlayStation exclusive credited by Empire magazine with providing “gaming’s Citizen Kane moment.” But although being anchored to some of the most beloved source material in modern popular culture sounds great on paper, it also means The Last of Us faces a veritable smorgasbord of widely different hopes, expectations and reservations about what it should and shouldn’t be. How, then, to review The Last of Us as a standalone TV show – one sure to be watched by more people who haven’t played the game than have – when so much of the noise surrounding its development has concerned questions of faithfulness? The answer, perhaps, is to run two reviews – one written by someone with an existing understanding of Druckmann’...