Quote:
Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
The praise is mostly from people who are familiar with the source material who might have been concerned about how that source material would be represented and are rightly happy with how good a job they've done of translating it to the screen, which isn't really praise for the show in its own right.
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Having played the first game and watched the first episode last night, I'm actually taken aback at how much praise this show is getting already. Talk of being "the best video game to TV/film adaptation in history!!1!" is a little premature in my opinion, but it is perhaps the most
faithful adaptation.
In fact I think that the TV show suffers a little from following the game so closely. There was a little bit of additional material, some modest revisions to some scenes, but this is otherwise a beat-for-beat remake of the game's first couple chapters. And that's fine, but it's different to me than making a live-action version of, say, a book. A book and a TV/film adaptation of the book will always have significant differences, because the picture you paint in your head when you read the book will be completely different than the way the TV/film adaptors will envision things. Third-person narration of a book is almost never replicated, so the pacing of the book vs. pacing of the TV/film adaptation will be completely different.
With a video game like
The Last of Us, even though the product on screen was originally a computer-generated image, it was still acted out. It was like an interactive movie that gave you the ability to contribute to the action in a minor way. The video game was already so close to what many effects-heavy movies otherwise are these days that it's... not even really an "adaptation" in my mind. Like, there's nothing that the actors who portrayed the characters in the video game did that the actors in the new
Avatar movie didn't also do: walked around in motion-capture suits and had camera rigs attached to their heads to capture facial movements, etc. The TV show actors are really just emulating the performances of other actors who already performed the roles, in reality, in a studio environment, who just happened to have a CG façade applied to their bodies and had those façades set into a CG set.
So, instead of feeling like Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey are "adapting" the roles for television, I feel like they're just copying what Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson already did. It's like making shot-for-shot remake of a movie from ten years ago, with mostly the same dialogue, and mostly the same cinematographic composition... It's more...
copying, than adapting.
I dunno, I just got this weird vibe from it, and to be perfectly honest I tuned out and didn't pay very close attention in the last 25 minutes or so. It's not even that I know how the story will generally go that bothers me: it's that I know almost
precisely how it'll go, and it's weird watching people do
precisely what other people already did.
I'm curious to see how they'll flesh out the rest of the story. At the pace they're going they'll run out of material from the video game in about five more episodes.