The Last of Us: less violence in the series (for a good cause)

We should not hope for the scent of hemoglobin in the adaptation of the video game which will soon arrive at our screens.

In two weeks, Ellie and Joel will finally make their debut on HBO for the grand premiere of the series The Last of Us. The long-awaited adaptation will begin its broadcast on January 15 on the American channel and the HBO Max streaming platform. For the moment, no news for French distribution after the end of the partnership between the American group and OCS. Rumors point to a broadcast on Amazon Prime Video, but we will have to wait for an official press release to know for sure.

While fans are getting impatient and worried, the creator of the video game and co-showrunner of the series continues to teaser this project by revealing some crisp information. If any of you were expecting a series as gory and trashy as the work on which it is based, you will have to lower your expectations. Neil Druckmann has just announced that the adaptation will be much less violent than the video game, but there is a very good reason for that.

More emotional scenes

The absence of violence in the trailers of the series was therefore not a trivial detail. This version of The Last of Us will free itself from the violence galore of the video game, simply because this kind of scene works differently in these two types of media. In an interview with SFX Magazine, Neil Druckmann explains this very important choice to make the series more impactful:

“One of the things I loved hearing from Craig Mazin and HBO was ‘Let’s take out all the violence except the essential.’ This made it possible to give more impact to the violence than in the video game. When you hold back from showing the threat that looms and finally see people’s reaction to it, it makes it all that much scarier. And when we reveal the Infected and the Clickers, you immediately understand what destroyed humanity and why everyone is afraid of it.”

Where recurring fights are necessary in a video game from a gameplay point of view but also to create tension, it is a completely different way of doing things that is applied to a series or a film. The Last of Us on HBO will therefore not fail to show us the horrors of this post-apocalyptic world, but in a more thoughtful way than in the original work. See you on January 15 for a long, very long first episode.