HBO’s The Last Of Us Has An Unbelievable Score On Rotten Tomatoes
The Last of Us has debuted on Rotten Tomatoes with a perfect 100% score.
HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us hasn’t even premiered yet, but it already has a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. As of the date of this writing, the show has 100 percent on the Tomatometer, which took an average of 24 ratings by critics.
Created by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckman, The Last of Us is a new series based on the video game from 2013. It will star Pedro Pascal as Joel, a smuggler who must help Ellie, a teenage girl played by Bella Ramsey, on a journey across post-apocalyptic America. Other notable characters will include Tommy, Joel’s brother, played by Gabriel Luna, and Joel’s smuggling partner Tess, played by Anna Torv.
Filmed in Alberta, Canada, The Last of Us is listed as the largest television production ever to have been carried out in that country. As the first video game ever to be made into a show for HBO as well, it is a highly anticipated addition to the network’s TV lineup.
Critics of Rotten Tomatoes praise the performances of the actors as well as the setting and design elements. John Nugent of Empire magazine said that fans of the game will be happy with the adaptation, saying that it “deepens the game’s dystopian lore, while staying true to its emotional core.”
Vicky Jessop of the London Evening Standard says that The Last of Us “expertly tugs on both the heartstrings and the nerves to create something that feels very bingeable.” This could be a good thing or a bad thing for initial ratings, seeing as the show will be released serially on the network, with a new episode premiering every Sunday night. So, full-on binge-watching won’t be possible until the show is wrapped up in mid-March.
No matter whether you watch the show each week or wait to watch The Last of Us all in one sitting later on, Critic Stephen Kelly of BBC.com is certain you’re going to like it. “It doesn’t feel even remotely controversial to call this the best video game adaptation ever made,” he gushes.
If one were to read the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes more closely, however, that perfect 100 percent score might be a bit premature. In addition to there not being any audience reviews available yet, the critics’ reviews might be a bit skewed. All of the reviews for The Last of Us are listed as positive (they all have that nice, bright, fresh tomato symbol on them), but many of them actually seem more lukewarm than glowing.
Judy Berman from TIME magazine, for instance, says that the show is “an exquisitely made adaptation,” but also that it “asks viewers to absorb a whole lot of human misery without saying much that we haven’t already heard in similar shows.”
Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair agrees: “The Last of Us series does not feel like a revolution of any kind—it is simply well-made television that elevates itself slightly above some of its genre peers.” So, while he says it is a good show, he also says that it’s nothing really new or special. So, thanks … I guess?
Other reviewers say that, while the show is amazing, it just can’t beat the original The Last of Us game, which encompasses a whole other set of criteria.
The consensus of all 24 reviews seems to be that yes, the show is great, but it may not be the most original thing to hit television in the last few years. So, perhaps it’s best to take that perfect Rotten Tomatoes score with a grain of salt and watch The Last of Us for yourself before you make up your mind about it.
