Kings and Skit: why the second season of "Some of Us" is a failure

In the first two months — 40 million views, the premiere season is the most popular in the history of HBO, "Emmy" — eight. "One of us", aka "The Last of Us", aka most often just "Last of Ace" is rightly considered one of the most successful TV series in recent years. On Monday night, the first episode of the second season was released in Moscow — and immediately appeared online with a professional Russian dubbing, although no official release in Russia has been announced. Izvestia watched it and did not understand why Western publications had given such high ratings: on aggregators, Last of Au's ratings are now approaching one hundred percent.

Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal have returned to their roles.

All viewers of the series "One of us" / "The Last of us" / Last of Us can be divided into two parts, and the big question is which one will be bigger. For those who are familiar with the video game, and those who somehow managed to miss it. There are no exact sales figures for the game, but it is known that the first part of it, released in 2013, by 2019, that is, before the re-release on PS5, had 20 million copies in the hands of users. The second part was released in 2020 and by 2022 it had sold more than 10 million copies. If we compare this with the 40 million views of the series in the first two months, it turns out that the numbers are about the same, although it can be assumed that not all players wanted to watch the series.

The reason is simple: if the game was more or less innovative for its time and certainly claimed the highest technological level, then the 2023 series for the most part resembled another (and there were many) re-release of this game, with new graphics, but with the same plot. That is, exactly the same as ten years ago, only played by the stars, heavily shortened, and in suspense much weaker than the original.

Three things saved the series. Firstly, Russian cinematographers Kantemir Balagov and Ksenia Sereda worked on it at first, and although Balagov quickly left the project and was not even mentioned in the credits, something remained of him. At least the series had a detailed prologue, which the game lacked, and a detailed description of what actually triggered the zombie apocalypse.

Secondly, Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal finally played everything that was difficult for computer actors to do. Finally, and thirdly, and most importantly, there was an insert episode in the series that wasn't in the game, and it was, frankly, worth the rest of the filming. It told about a family that decided not to join gangs, not to flee to totalitarian cities, but to live their lives proudly and independently on an island of tranquility. And these modern-day Robinson Crusoe and Friday were so amazing that I want to watch the episode dedicated to them over and over again.

But let's be honest: from a cinematic point of view, the best film adaptation of The Last of Us was Casey Affleck's low-budget independent film The Light of My Life, clearly inspired by the game. Only in the game does the main character protect a girl who is immune to a fungus that turns people into zombies, and Affleck's character (he's a director, screenwriter, producer, and lead actor) takes care of a girl in a world where all women are extinct, and men behave worse than any zombies because extinction lies ahead. Affleck's film contains a lot of quiet despair, paternal tenderness, and even biblical motifs: the Father doesn't just have a name, and of course we immediately remember Lot. The final conflict in the game, the series and in Affleck's film is the same — the girl's life and the existence of humanity are on the scales.

How to watch the second season of Last of Us

It's hard to say who told the creators of the second season and why that it was necessary to follow the plot of the second part of the game more precisely. But, as one Western observer quipped, as a result, it sometimes feels like we're watching a friend of ours play a game. But that's hard to understand. The game was released not so long ago, it is remembered very well, and everything is the same here. As we remember, the first season ended with Joel initially giving Ellie to the doctors for experiments, and then realizing that they wanted to kill her to extract the serum. So he just shot everyone and took the unconscious girl away.

And now five years have passed. The surviving members of the Cicadas (or "Fireflies") want to take revenge on Joel for the massacre, while he lives with Ellie in a remote fortress town and prepares to celebrate the new year 2029. Joel and his "stepdaughter" have a terrible relationship, and if it was more of a teenage rebellion in the game, then Ellie, in theory, has already passed this age, since she was originally older in the series than in the original. Ellie lives apart, communicates more with her peers, especially with her best friend Dina.

We watch the first episode that came out and realize with horror that we are again seeing the same verbatim re-enactment of old familiar scenes. If everything goes on like this, then in the coming episodes, the girl Abby, saved from zombies, will brutally kill Joel (the best moment in the entire second part of the game), and then there will be a classic female buddy movie, because Ellie and Dina will act. The intrigue can only come down to watching, "how will they play out this scene, and this one, and this one?" Is it interesting? Perhaps not very much. However, since Abby was not saved in the first episode, then maybe, according to the law of the butterfly effect, the plot will move along a different path, and then the second season will become an alternative story. If Joel survives, then the adventures will be different. But it's hard to believe this, considering how many of the texts from Western colleagues, who seem to have been allowed to see the following episodes, are all about the careful attitude of the series' authors to the plot.

So far, practice has shown that the more free filmmakers are in game adaptations, the better the result. From the first "Mortal Kombat" and "Resident Evil" to "Arkane", "Super Mario Brothers" and the latest "Minecraft" — all these are very free productions, fantasies on the subject. Spectacular, filled with love for the source material, they were never illustrations, attempts to make an expensive skit with the reproduction of game mechanics. On the contrary, attempts at parallel transfer look comical and, of course, sad, because huge budgets and resources of talented artists, artists, cameramen, and computer graphics specialists are being spent. The output is not a movie, but a deluxe reissue of the same game, although such a product, as we know, often finds a grateful buyer.