So I saw this on Facebook not too terribly long ago, found myself a bit skeptical and then decided to take a few minutes to check it out a bit further. And it appears to be true. The Last of Us
is being adapted into a movie. And it's going to follow the plot of the game.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. It has been a long time since I saw a movie based on a specific game I actually liked. And The Last of Us, in a lot of ways, certainly lends itself well to the big screen (the infected, particularly clickers and
bloaters in a theater? Nightmare fuel…). However, a lot of the emotion, particularly tension, that the game conveys depends on the gameplay part. Namely, when you find a group of infected between you and your goal and you have to get around them, you find yourself asking two questions: 1. How do I try to approach this? and 2. What if I mess this up and find a clicker likes the taste of my neck? And it's worth noting that charging in guns blazing is usually the worst way to go about getting around a bunch of infected, which might not lend itself so well to the big screen. I find myself wondering how they might maintain that kind of tension in a movie.
Done right, it could definitely be pretty good. But I see more than a few opportunities for pitfalls. I am slightly assured, though, that the creative forces at Naughty Dog who were behind the game will be part of the movie team, and can hopefully help keep the movie decently true to the game and resist doing some things that are good for the big screen but don't fit for the game. I mean, of course they're going to have to make some choices in that respect as games and movies are two different mediums, I just hope they make the right ones…whatever those even end up being.
Any thoughts/opinions, on this particularly adaptation or movies being made from games in general?