Shockingly enough, the pandemic seems to have depleted our appetite for apocalypse fantasy. Who'd have thought it? Not the people who made "The Walking Dead," "World War Z" and every other shambling undead property that ruled the 2010s, along with more recent end-of-the-world, zombie-free tales like "Y: The Last Man" or the remake of "The Stand."
If their brief lifespans are an indicator of the longevity odds of "The Last of Us," HBO's high-budget video game adaptation would seem to have a difficult if not impassable road ahead of it – and not merely due to our presumed fatigue with scripts about some impending version of Earth's big Game Over. Conversions of console-based mythologies to screens have a notoriously poor track record. In that regard, the starting line for "The Last of Us" is better positioned than, say, the challenge that the "Resident Evil" series writers faced in their effort to conjure prime rib out of the conceptual equivalent of Steak-Umms.
