Latest news with #zombies
New York Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Want More of ‘The Last of Us'? Read These Books Next.
HBO's propulsive, nail-biting series 'The Last of Us' — based on the acclaimed video game by Naughty Dog — offers a bleak and brutal depiction of the apocalypse, as hardscrabble survivors including Joel (Pedro Pascal), Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced) navigate a fallen world crawling with flesh-eating 'infected,' not to mention other healthy humans who range from desperate and mistrustful to aggressively sadistic. The show is violent and at times disturbing — especially in its shocking second season, which recently concluded — but there's more to it than action spectacle. A deep undercurrent of emotion runs through the series, making this story about zombies compulsively watchable, frequently moving and deeply human. While the first season of the show faithfully adapted the eponymous video game, HBO has split the story of its sequel, 2020's The Last of Us Part II, into two installments — meaning that we're leaving things on a considerable cliffhanger. If your craving for killer fungi, survival stories, revenge tales and postapocalyptic considerations of what we owe to each other isn't quite satisfied, these 10 novels can scratch that itch. Severance Not to be confused with another popular 2025 series, this darkly comic novel — published two years before Covid-19 — is an incisive (and prescient) portrait of a society stumbling through a devastating pandemic. The contagion here is Shen Fever, a debilitating fungal disease that turns its victims into (harmless) zombies. Even as it decimates the globe, Candace Chen, a millennial Chinese American woman living in New York City, resolves to see out the end of her contract doing product coordination for a Bible publisher. It's fairly soul-sucking drudgery but, it turns out, an improvement on life after societal collapse, when Candace finds herself sheltering in an Illinois shopping mall with a band of other survivors from whom she's hiding a secret. Manhunt In Felker-Martin's postapocalyptic thriller, a plague that targets testosterone has turned half the population into a brainless mass of murderers and rapists, leaving the matriarchy to reign supreme. But for Beth and Fran, two trans women keeping their hormones in check with home remedies, it isn't only the bloodthirsty men they need to worry about: Roving bands of TERFs view them not as fellow sister-survivors but as interlopers who need to be expunged. A smart book about the politics of gender and the perils of transphobia, 'Manhunt' could easily have turned didactic — but Felker-Martin, a dyed-in-the-wool horror fan, delights in the genre's free-flowing carnage, and that glee is tons of fun. What Moves the Dead Ursula Vernon, writing under a pseudonym, reimagines Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher' as fungus-themed body horror in this slender, atmospheric novel set in the fictitious European nation of Ruravia. Alex Easton, a retired soldier of indeterminate gender, travels to the remote country home of the Ushers, Alex's childhood friends who have taken ill with a mysterious sickness that also seems to be afflicting various wildlife on the manor grounds. The style is Gothic and the tone is gloomy but playful, befitting the connection to Poe — but the creepy fungal growths and malformed hares are entirely Vernon's own. How High We Go in the Dark Nagamatsu's postapocalyptic novel begins like so many others: with the discovery of a virus, unearthed from the melting Siberian permafrost. But as the 'Arctic plague' devastates the globe, the novel breaks into fragments — each a kind of short-form fable about the aftershocks of modern civilization. Some, like a story about a euthanasia theme park that painlessly executes terminally ill children, have the caustic sting of David Foster Wallace; others, particularly a late episode set on a vessel launched into deep space, pose poignant questions about what it means to be human. It's an impressive range of interconnected stories — and that's without mentioning the one about the talking pig. The Road An apocalypse story seemed like a considerable departure for the author of 'All the Pretty Horses,' 'No Country for Old Men' and other beloved westerns. But while the end-of-the-world setting suggests a pivot to sci-fi, the familiar hallmarks of McCarthy's fiction — ultra-spare prose, uncompromising realism — make this entirely of a piece with his previous work. A father and son traverse a barren American landscape in the aftermath of an undisclosed cataclysm, encountering the best and worst of humanity. Amid the desolation, McCarthy offers occasional glimpses of hope, and a beautiful depiction of an unbreakable parental bond. Station Eleven This hauntingly beautiful novel opens with the emergence of a virulent new flu, which kills its victims so rapidly that an actor is felled in the middle of a performance of 'King Lear'; 20 years later, where we lay our scene, most of the world's population has long since been wiped out. The story is centered around Kirsten, an 8-year-old child actor at the onset of the plague, who now roams the area around the Great Lakes with the Traveling Symphony, a troupe of actors who perform classical music and Shakespeare plays for colonies of fellow survivors. Evocative, page-turning and full of intrigue, Mandel's 2014 novel is more relevant than ever post-Covid. (There is also an excellent HBO series adaptation.) Parable of the Sower Butler's novel, published in 1993, is set in 2024 in a United States devastated by climate change, overrun with corrupt white nationalists and governed by a feckless autocrat who promises to 'make America great again.' It is science fiction that blurs disconcertingly into contemporary realism: Scenes of large swaths of California ablaze can be found both in its pages and across this year's news. It is also an astute, heart-pumping story about the meaning of community, and about a teenage girl with an uncanny gift navigating the privileges and dangers that come with it. California Lepucki's understated take on the apocalypse imagines a civilization fractured by a changing climate in which Americans reside in walled-off communities or live as best they can off the land. We follow a 20-something couple — Cal, a survivalist, and Frida, a former banker — as they traverse the Golden State in search of a stable place to land. By narrowing her focus to ordinary human relationships — which, in this new world, are fraught with many of the same tensions (miscommunication, longing, diverging needs) that prevailed in the old one — Lepucki puts a nuanced new spin on an often sensationalized genre. World War Z Subtitled 'An Oral History of the Zombie War' — and written as a follow-up to 'The Zombie Survival Guide,' a fictitious instructional manual for dealing with a plague of the undead — Brooks's cleverly structured novel is told through a series of interviews with survivors of the apocalypse. The sober, pseudoscientific naturalism of Brooks's writing has notes of Michael Crichton (particularly his classic techno-thriller 'The Andromeda Strain'), offering a vividly plausible simulation of how things might go if humankind had to fight off a brain-eating horde. (Spoiler: Not great!) The Girl With All the Gifts Melanie is a guileless 10-year-old girl living in Britain. She is well-mannered, possesses a genius I.Q. … and insatiably craves human flesh. When the book begins, Melanie — one of the 'hungry,' as this world calls its undead — is under observation at a military base in London, but when scavengers attack the facility, she and her teacher are forced to go on the run. In telling this story of humanity's last stand against a devastating fungal infection largely through Melanie's eyes, Carey adds a tragic dimension to a brutal tale — like Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go' if it involved zombies.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Last Of Us' 'The Price' Broke Me More Than Any Episode So Far, And Here's Why
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. SPOILER WARNING: The following article dives deep into two of the most important moments from The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 6. If you have not yet used your Max subscription to catch up on the apocalypse, I recommend you make like a survivor approaching an abandoned building and proceed with caution. I am not much of a gamer, but as a fan of zombie movies, I was very excited for the debut of HBO's series adaptation of the PlayStation hit, The Last of Us, and I can certainly say I have not been disappointed. That being said, I could not say the apocalyptic TV show had a personally emotional effect on me… until I saw the sixth episode of Season 2, 'The Price.' Not only can I confidently say that no program on the 2025 TV schedule (or in any recent year that I can think of) has left me as shaken as The Last of Us with this particular episode, which consists of flashbacks that bridge the gap between seasons. No other episode of this show has left me in such a state of heartbreak and lasting ponderance, which is really saying something when you consider how this show thrives on tragedy. Allow me to explain why it took this long for the series to break me. One of the most talked-about moments from The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 6, sees Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) come across a bitten Eugene (Joe Pantoliano). Joel promises him and Ellie that he will wait for her to come back and bring the ailing man to Jackson to see his wife, the local therapist Gail (Catherine O'Hara, who cried a lot while filming this episode), one last time. Unfortunately, Joel breaks that promise and shoots the man dead before Ellie returns. 'Joey Pants' makes a great case for his second Emmy (which he previously won after shaking up the cast of The Sopranos in Season 3) with this despairing performance that, quite frankly, I am not sure would have had as much of an effect on me if I were not married. Hearing him respond to Joel's promise that he would deliver his last words for Gail with, 'No, I need her last words for me!' and begging for her face to be the last thing he sees really got to me because I would be pleading the same. For my wife to be the last thing I see before I pass is all I can hope for, too. Stream The Last of Us on Max for less by bundling Unless you watch The Last of Us the traditional way, when it airs on HBO, you probably catch up on video game adaptation by streaming on Max, which costs $16.99 per month with a standard plan. However, you could be bundling your subscription with your Disney+ and Hulu account for $29.99 per month, which saves you $6.99 on Max, plus the same price on two more great streaming platforms Deal I could have never anticipated that, after witnessing Eugene's devastating final plea (a welcome change from the Last of Us video games, from what I hear), 'The Price' would tap into my emotions any further. Lo and behold, I was wrecked by the final scene, when Ellie confronts Joel about ruining the chance for a Cordyceps cure by rescuing her from the Fireflies, and he explains he did it out of love for her and would do it again if given the chance. What really did me in was when he tells his surrogate daughter that, if she has children of her own, he hopes she does 'a little bit better than me,' echoing his own father's words from the cold open. At the moment I write this, I am not a parent, but my wife and I intend to have children sometime soon, and yet, to be perfectly candid, the idea of bringing a child into this world terrifies me. Clearly, I have less hazardous circumstances to contend with than Joel did (and I pray it stays that way), but I nonetheless agonize over, not just keeping my children safe, but also doing right by them in a just manner. Thankfully, Ellie's admission that she would be willing to try to forgive Joel for his actions gave me hope that, as long as my approach to parenting comes from a place of love, we will be all right. Inevitably, I have found many reasons to compare this series to a show similar to The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, and even found a similarity between Joel's murder and another tragic character death. However, that hit series never got to me like this show has for the reasons above. So, for my money, The Last of Us reigns as TV's superior zombie apocalypse series for now.
New York Times
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
What I Like About Zombies
My husband is sleeping peacefully beside me. Down the hall, the children doze, too — no stomachaches or nightmares tonight. But I cannot sleep. I'm staring at the ceiling, head full of screeching zombies and blown-out cities. 'The Last of Us,' the HBO series about a fungus that turns people into zombies, based on a video game, returned for its second season last month. I have been unwell since. Each episode has left me sleeping badly and haunted while awake, dreading the next Sunday, when I'll have to sit down in front of my TV and do it all again. I spent the 57 unbearable minutes of Season 2, Episode 2, gripping, alternately, my husband and the giant cushion that more typically forms the back of our couch, occasionally screaming variations on 'Dear God,' 'No' and 'Ugh.' I know that in the two years since I survived Season 1, there must have been many months when I lived a normal life, not contemplating zombies at all, much less the apocalyptic potential of mushrooms. And yet now that the show is back, I cannot fathom how exactly that worked. If you see me this spring — cheering enthusiastically at my son's baseball game, making small talk at the potluck barbecue — know that inside, I am barely holding it together. 'Why don't you just stop watching?' you ask. So do my friends, my family, the waitress who had the unfortunate responsibility of explaining a mushroom dish to me recently. It's a great question and one I've asked myself daily since mid-April. Why am I, a 40-year-old woman whose other hobbies include analyzing Taylor Swift lyrics and shopping for athleisure, so obsessed with a show that is clearly torturing me? I've come to the unfortunate realization that the torture might be the point. There's no better distraction from whatever currently ails you than, well, something worse. I could use some distraction these days. When I'm thinking about the zombie apocalypse, I am not thinking about the kind-of-sort-of-possibly apocalyptic things that are really taking place in 2025. My brain just can't do both things at once. So while I salute all of you out there doing the hard work to make change in our actual world, I guess I choose the zombies. We watch them — or some other terrible, fictional creature — on the screen, and we're swallowed whole into another world. We're forced to come right up to the edge of the thing that scares us. We remind ourselves that it isn't real, but we think, too: What if it were? Could we face it? And how? Often, we come around to a place where we believe we could. I was first exposed to this approach years ago, when I had a miscarriage. It was the first truly bad thing that ever happened to me, and I was feeling shattered, bereft. Some people return to reruns of 'The Office' in such a moment or the romantic comedies of their youth. My therapist recommended horror movies. Horror movies? I did not like blood and guts. I did not like moments of suspense. I did not like 'The Blair Witch Project' when I saw it in 1999. My therapist swore the grisly shock of the genre helped jolt many of her patients out of their circumstances, out of their grief, at least for an hour or two. I couldn't bring myself to do it until I landed in the hospital with another pregnancy gone sideways. My husband and I put 'Get Out' on my laptop, propping the computer on the hospital bed. I remember feeling, strangely, a little lighter as we watched, freed from my questions and worries and heartbreak, intently focused on someone else's very, very bad day. (Having your girlfriend's family try to swap your brain — it could always be worse.) I wish I could get this specific brand of perspective by watching 'When Harry Met Sally.' Gamers, preppers and general fans of gore handle such content just fine, but I remain weak. With 'The Last of Us,' I'm out of my depth; I lack a proper support system. I recently tried to steer the conversation in my 16-person 'Neighborhood Mommas' group chat toward the zombie show. The response was mostly crickets, save one friend who asked if 'The Last of Us' was the one Blake Lively filed a lawsuit over. (That's the movie 'It Ends With Us,' based on a romance novel. Very different vibes.) My husband hasn't been much help, either. He's watched the show unperturbed while eating snacks. After years of fishing for compliments, I began fishing for comfort. 'A fungal zombie pandemic couldn't actually happen, right?' I asked him, a biology major in college, before bed one night. 'In theory,' he said matter-of-factly, turning out the light. I settled in for another night of staring at the ceiling. The season ends Sunday night, thank God. I feel relief, as if I had been spared by a giant mushroom zombie. All I have to do is get through this episode, and then I can move on with my life. But I'll admit there's a tinge of sadness, too. The real world will surely continue being relentless. The news will have me desperate for a reprieve. What terrifying alternate reality will I escape to now? The only thing worse than suffering through a fantasy apocalypse is having to find a new one.
New York Times
22-05-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
The Pacers' mastery of late-game playoff comebacks has one comparison: Zombies!
The Bounce Newsletter | This is The Athletic's daily NBA newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Bounce directly in your inbox. They are the fast-moving zombies from movies I always thought zombie movies were kind of dumb and corny. They were fun and campy, but still dumb and corny. These slow, ambling undead attackers are supposed to scare me? You could get away from them with a light jog or even a powerwalk like old people doing laps around a mall. But then, zombie movies took it to a new level most of us had never even considered. They had fast, relentlessly sprinting zombies! They'd never stop pursuing at top speed! Advertisement That's this Pacers team. In the live blog on The Athletic website, Eric Nehm warned several times that the Pacers can't be counted out, no matter what. Not until the game is over. He let out the warning when it was 118-102 with 7:24 left. And again when it was a five-point game with 34 seconds remaining. We got to that point because Aaron Nesmith hit five 3-pointers from the 4:45 mark to the 34-second mark. That fifth one being anointed with the classic Kevin Harlan, 'He's a flamethrower!' That's when things really got out of hand. The Knicks went from cruising to a Game 1 victory to trying to hold on for dear life. They turned it over, and Nesmith hit another 3-pointer to cut it to two. Karl-Anthony Towns was fouled and split two free throws. The Knicks fouled Nesmith to prevent him from shooting another 3-pointer and he knocked them both down. Then, OG Anunoby split two free throws to make it a two-point game with seven seconds left, and that's when we got a remix of an iconic moment. Haliburton pushed up the floor like one of those fast-moving zombies. He looked like he was attacking for the tie at the rim, and then decided to try to rip the hearts out of everybody in Madison Square Garden. The pullback to the 3-point line. The high bounce off the rim. The drop through the net. At the time, everybody thought it was a game-winning 3-pointer that was stunning MSG like he stunned the Cleveland crowd in Game 2 of the previous round. So much so that Haliburton decided to recreate the infamous Reggie Miller 'choke taunt' right in front of Reggie, thinking the game was over as the refs reviewed the shot. It turned out to be a 2-pointer, as the replay showed, and they went to overtime, which was just as chaotic. They exchanged buckets for the final couple minutes, before Haliburton found Andrew Nembhard for a layup to take the lead and the Pacers got an Obi Toppin dunk to extend the lead to three. On the Knicks' final possession, Jalen Brunson and Towns both missed tying 3-point attempts. And the choke taunt from Haliburton earlier got its delayed vindication with the 138-135 win. Advertisement After the game, Haliburton said he did the taunt because he thought it was a 3-pointer at the end of regulation and he wouldn't have done it if he'd known it was a 2. Regardless, it's a moment that will add to the history of these two teams battling in the postseason. Haliburton had 31 points, 11 assists and just two turnovers. Nesmith had 30 points, with 20 coming in a five-minute stretch. That's what it took to overcome a game-high 43 points from Brunson and 35 from KAT to steal Game 1. Knicks were absolutely stunned last night 🗽 What just happened? Nobody believes what they saw last night. This is how Knicks fans reacted. 🏀 Big-time collapse. James Edwards III takes you deeper inside what happened. How'd the Knicks lose Game 1? 🏀 Come back. Charles Barkley wants someone back in attendance for these games: Haliburton's dad. 🏀 Wide-open league. David Aldridge breaks down how the NBA is enjoying parity in the playoffs. 👀 He said what? Michael Malone backed an MVP candidate on television. And it wasn't Nikola Jokić. 🎧 He said what? Today's 'NBA Daily' examines how the Knicks can right their ship in Game 2. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander finally earns nod After an unprecedented run of 27 years of not waiting until the conference finals to deliver the MVP announcement, the NBA decided to switch things up for some reason. Was it to inexplicably avoid hurt feelings or drama during the battle of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Nikola Jokić during their incredible, seven-game, second-round series? That's the theory many believe. Even though it would have added so much fun and good drama to the affair. Whatever the reason, the NBA finally announced the MVP award yesterday, with the Thunder guard winning his first. Gilgeous-Alexander received 71 of the 100 first-place votes, as the other 29 went to Jokić. SGA ended up with 913 voting points to beat out Jokić's 787 points, denying Big Honey his fourth MVP award. It's the third MVP for a Thunderer since 2014 (Kevin Durant in 2014 and Russell Westbrook in 2017). Here's how this season's voting broke down: The MVP debate was heated the last half of the season, but super interesting if you could manage to get into an honest conversation about it. Sometimes, with Defensive Player of the Year debates, you can get into whether or not you should value versatility over a guy who just shuts off the rim completely. And what that does for the impact of a defense. With this MVP debate, it felt like you could get into how you value different things about two fantastic candidates. Advertisement With Jokić, the numbers are easy to follow and traditionally absurd. They're also absurd in a modern way when you slice it into the advanced metrics. His size and looming stature make him a bully, and his skill level and deft touch make him a surgeon. It's so clear that he's the best player in the world. With SGA, he also had a historic season in a different way. His stats didn't look like anything we've ever seen. He also was the best player on a team that was historically dominant. It sounds like a copout, but it's truly one of those MVP races where neither of the top two candidates were a wrong choice. I am quite confused how James Harden got a fifth-place vote, though. The story of the greatest players in NBA history. In 100 riveting profiles, top basketball writers justify their selections and uncover the history of the NBA in the process. The story of the greatest players in NBA history. Wolves to fight resilience with reslience It's worth reminding everybody that Game 1 between the Timberwolves and Thunder was a 10-point game with five minutes left. Then, the Thunder just dismantled everything with a wave of defensive prowess and offensive execution to make it look like a laugher. But this was within reach for a Wolves team that has pretty much played the Thunder evenly all season. However, the regular season does not necessarily mean anything when we get to the big spotlight. So, how do the Wolves show their resilience they've had all year against arguably the most resilient team in the NBA? That's their task in trying to bounce back in Game 2 and snatch home-court advantage away from the best team and best defense in the NBA. These are the three areas in which they have to show a vast improvement tonight: 1. Keep trusting 3-point looks. It's easy to look at the Wolves' 3-point shooting and think this was a horrific performance. I mean … it was. They shot 15-of-51 from downtown. That's 29.4 percent for anybody who doesn't want to bust out the calculator. I don't think their 3-point attack was nearly that bad, though. Especially not in the first half of the game. Naz Reid, Donte DiVincenzo, Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Mike Conley are typically 3-point shooters who are quite reliable. Reid is the weakest shooter of the bunch this season, and he knocked down 37.9 percent of his 3-pointers. In Game 1, they combined for 6-of-33 from downtown. That's 18.1 percent from four extremely reliable and good shooters. The Wolves, as a whole, generated excellent looks during the game. They just didn't fall. Personally, I wouldn't change a whole lot for how they generated those looks, depending on the defensive adjustments the Thunder make for Game 2. Of their 51 attempts, 30 were wide-open 3-pointers. The Wolves made eight of them. That's 26.7 percent on a shot the Wolves hit 40 percent of the time in the regular season. Advertisement 2. Make turnovers work for you. Obviously, the Wolves can't turn the ball over 19 times. And they can't give up 31 points off their 19 turnovers. That just doesn't work, even though the Thunder are so good at forcing turnovers. Thirteen of those 19 turnovers were live-ball turnovers. That's really tough to stop from turning into scoring opportunities for the opponent. But it's the other side of that equation the Wolves needed to take advantage of when their opponents made mistakes. The Wolves forced 15 turnovers and scored 10 points off of them. However, Minnesota scored zero fast-break points in the game. Zero! They had six shots in fast-break opportunities and missed all six – not a single point. That's not putting any kind of pressure on a retreating, scrambling transition defense. You can't survive a playoff game without finding ways to get those quick, momentum-swinging points. 3. Get into the paint. Part of the reason the Wolves were outscored 54-20 in the paint was they attempted so many 3-pointers. Again, they had a lot of quality looks. I think you'll live with those shot attempts and trust your shooters. But they need to get the ball into the paint to force tough decisions by the Thunder's defense more. They need more paint points than 20. They need to hold onto the ball when they get it inside. They need to put pressure on the rim to force the defense to collapse. Anthony Edwards not turning his ankle would help that. He has to be aggressive, but so does everybody on this team. Rudy Gobert has to be a reliable force at the rim. Jaden McDaniels has to score in the paint. It takes everybody applying that pressure. Game 2 is at 8:30 p.m. ET on ESPN. (Stream on Fubo for free Streaming links in this article are provided by partners of The Athletic. Restrictions may apply. The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Partners have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Hollywood Figured Out How to Adapt Video Games. I Wish It Hadn't.
How do you turn a video game about zombies into a television show? If you're making 'The Last of Us,' HBO's Emmy-winning post-apocalypse drama, you take a sober approach, treating the zombie-killing action as an opportunity to articulate profound things about the human condition. You remind viewers that what matters is not the spectacle of the end of the world, but the resilience of the survivors as they cling to their tattered humanity. And so, like the PlayStation game on which it is based, 'The Last of Us' becomes a grim show with big themes: the power of hope, the futility of vengeance, the terrible things we'll do to survive. But if you were making 'House of the Dead,' based on the 1990s arcade game, you went in guns blazing. This 2003 film, from the notoriously disreputable German director Uwe Boll, contained practically no coherent ideas, and its primary motivation seemed to be to cram as many bare breasts, exploding corpses and nu-metal songs into one movie as the Motion Picture Association of America would allow. The game it was based on was not exactly a paragon of artistic merit to begin with. But even by the crude standards of the source material, Boll's film, with its constant slo-mo and goofy 'Matrix'-style camera movements, felt especially tasteless. Everything I know about movies and television tells me that 'The Last of Us' is the superior adaptation — subtle instead of broad, mature instead of childish, concerned with real feelings instead of lizard-brain titillation. And yet every time I watch it, some recess of my soul yearns for the lurid, tooled-up lunacy of stuff like 'House of the Dead.' 'The Last of Us' is a duly touching story of trauma and grief, but it feels as if everything lately is a duly touching story of trauma and grief. When was the last time you put on a movie and saw slow-motion shots of a woman in a Star-Spangled Banner leotard dodging a sledgehammer-wielding zombie? It's not the trashiness itself that I'm nostalgic for. What made 'House of the Dead' charming was its idiosyncrasies, and idiosyncrasy is precisely what the current generation of video-game adaptations has managed to iron out. Hollywood has learned how to produce successful, respectable game adaptations by slotting them into proven formulas, like comic-book blockbusters and prestige TV. You know what to expect: either a serious-minded, no-nonsense drama, as with 'The Last of Us' or 'The Witcher,' or an irreverent, wisecracking comedy full of inside jokes and fan service, as with 'The Super Mario Bros. Movie,' 'Sonic the Hedgehog' or 'A Minecraft Movie.' Adaptation is a solved problem. But before Hollywood solved it, the industry simply let artists — and, yes, sometimes hacks — attack the problem with creative abandon. The results were as delightfully singular as they were critically reviled. You could walk into Andrzej Bartowiak's 'Doom' movie with no idea that you were about to encounter a five-minute point-of-view action sequence shot in one unbroken take. You could also read a one-star review of it by Roger Ebert, who hated it so much that he ended up provoking a debate over whether video games could ever be art. These movies had a lowly reputation, but I look back on them with gratitude and affection. For all their faults, they were alive with creative possibility — with the freedom to be bad on fresh terms. The video games of decades past didn't have much in the way of a narrative. When movies wanted to cash in on game I.P., they had to invent stories to suit the material. The 1993 film version of 'Super Mario Bros.' reimagined the vague premise — two plumbers saving a princess — as a kind of fantasy epic set in an alternate dimension. 'Street Fighter' and 'Mortal Kombat' turned arcade fighting games into martial-arts thrillers by adding their own elaborate lore. Practically the only resemblance that the 1994 film 'Double Dragon' bore to the game was that its heroes wore red and blue. This looseness was often a liability, resulting in slapdash scripts that bordered on the improvisatory. But it also liberated films to make surprising choices. In 2002, Paul W. S. Anderson, the director of 'Mortal Kombat,' returned to gaming to adapt 'Resident Evil,' a survival-horror game about a mansion crawling with zombies. But instead of delivering the obvious haunted-house flick, the film transplanted the action to a futuristic facility full of laser traps and deadly elevators. This unique spin spawned five successful sequels — peaking, for me, with 'Resident Evil: Retribution,' whose opening scene depicts an operatic raid of an aircraft carrier that unfolds in slow motion and in reverse. You will never see something so wonderfully odd in a game movie now. As games became more sophisticated, their stories became more complex, in ways that often resembled Hollywood films. At nearly the same time, the dominant mode of Hollywood — big-budget, effects-driven action spectacles — came to more closely resemble video games. This convergence has been detrimental to both films and games, but it has certainly made it easier for games to leap to the big screen. Toward the end of the last decade, a string of largely faithful, straightforward adaptations — 'Warcraft,' 'Assassin's Creed,' a new 'Tomb Raider' — seemed to signal that game movies had shaken off their stigma and embraced their material in earnest. By the time 'The Last of Us' arrived in 2023, replicating some scenes from the game almost shot for shot, The Wall Street Journal was asking whether we had reached 'the golden age of video-game I.P.' But the decline in imaginative potential is also apparent — perhaps nowhere more than in the case of the two 'Mario' movies. The original 'Super Mario Bros.' movie was a dark comic fantasy with stylized sets and pleasingly tactile production design, like a cross between 'Blade Runner' and 'Brazil.' Its tone — spiky, semisatirical, oddly downbeat — had nothing whatsoever to do with the jovial tenor of the game franchise. It also featured marvelously bizarre sights like a scenery-chewing Dennis Hopper, his hair bleached and spiked, bathing in a vat of mud like Baron Harkonnen in 'Dune.' The film is not without its faults, including strained logic and corny one-liners. But it is nothing if not distinctly, almost defiantly original. By contrast, 'The Super Mario Bros. Movie,' from 2023, feels as if it were designed in a lab. This animated movie takes as many cues from the games as possible, sticking to its sources so closely that it even recreates a car-selection menu from the racing game Mario Kart. What it doesn't take from the games, it borrows from Marvel movies: winking, self-referential humor; action heroics; a busy, ingratiating, eager-to-please zeal. The earlier Mario was played by Bob Hoskins; the new one is voiced by Chris Pratt. The film has been calibrated to please fans while remaining appealingly safe to newcomers — and it has clearly worked, becoming one of the highest-grossing animated movies of all time. But I don't think even its most ardent admirers would mistake it for a work of great imagination. Many more adaptations are coming: 'Mortal Kombat,' 'Street Fighter,' 'The Legend of Zelda,' 'Watch Dogs,' 'Splinter Cell,' 'God of War.' Many will be successful, and some, I'm sure, will be genuinely great. But I don't expect any of them to be eye-opening or surprising. Has their quality improved? Probably. But even quality, like stories of trauma and grief, can become boring. Whereas zombies swinging sledgehammers in slo-mo is the kind of thing that never gets old.
