Naughty Dog: The Last of Us (Sony)

Zombies and Kids...
The Last of Us trailer released by Sony and Naughty Dog takes a zombie breakout to talk about the loss of innocence. There is a lot happening in the 2 minutes trailer. The special aspect of it is that they have shot it in ps3 which makes the thing a little bit harder since this machine is not particularly designed for such a task. This gives place to suspicion that we see ingame graphics in the trailer. Well it looks good. But since this is definitely not a gameplay video it is free to go here.
The trailer is mostly build onto the idea Cormac McCarthy unfolded in his book The Road (Trailer of the movie version): What if you survive the apocalypse with your child? Well there are no zombies in McCarthy but the idea is quite the same that there bad and good stalkers in a world where the only food left on the earth is human flash. Anthropophagy or cannibalism is very popular in movies recently. Actually the funny side of this is represented in "The Book of Eli".Well still terrible, but it goes like a joke there.

So back on zombies and The Last of Us. Of course Zombies are the metaphor of conformism and consumerism. Here is a world where zombies have destroyed everything and they are hunting down the few uninfected humans who are stalking amongst the ruins of our culture. It might be pathetic but that is how the line of this metaphor goes. (Check the movies of Romero for more reference). A further slightly deeper aspect of this is the critic of capitalism. In McCarthy this is quite clear. In capitalism you are always the competitor of someone which means you are fighting for the same resources. This means also that you are eating up the others (if you think the consumption of other companies). In this respect capitalism is a quite traditional system since in history the main competitors (countries, nations) had conquered each other frequently. So eating each other is not a new thing but just the trivial darwinian metaphor of competition.
Alive humans represent values that we tend to honour in others. For example having a child is not really a capitalist virtue. It takes too much effort and time and makes your life much harder. There is the point where we arrive to the story where we have a father and his daughter. After seeing dead person (died recently for his blood is still dropping to the ground) we see a child. Since the guy is not eaten it has been killed by an other human, not a zombie. And out of the window we see that nature is strong and alive which gives the overall feeling of naturality. These things happening now belong to nature. And an other aspect is that people seem to have plenty of resources since there are other things to eat (not like the ones in the McCarthy story). And they do not need to hunt each others. They only need to survive the zombies. But apparently the kill each other. And this is their natural habit. Very critical and still only 30 seconds into the trailer (excluding opening credits so you find this at: 0:20-0:50). And then we see a girl running from the site of the murder.
There is an interesting tension in this. The girl is running like a child on the playground. And she does not notice the corpse. This shows how cruel this world could be. If children are used to corpses even bloody corpses that is a terrible world to live in. (They supposed to be shocked by that sight). She even steps into the blood which shows that for her its like only a puddle. Completely natural for her.
On a second thought, and that is where tension steps in, it is a bedroom. And bedrooms usually have only one entrance. So his coming out of the scene of the crime. And if you watch closely she has some red reflection on her right hand at 0:50-51. Well if there was a police there these things would make her easily a suspect of murder. At least this far of the trailer. The tension is elevated while we see that she is alone in this dangerous house. And something happens in an upper level. The classic horror moment comes when she tarts to go up there to see what is happening there. Very clever...And here we feel the horror feeling, we want her to be safe no matter what. "RUN AWAY KID!!" Only in almost 40 seconds. Great!
So a lot happened already under one minute. This vivid concision is a real virtue.
The tension dissolves with the next few shots. We see clearly that she has no blood on her hand when she pulls her knife out of her pocket seeing a middle age man beating an other to death. Well one tension for an other and this one is much bigger. So we got some tension already with the murder and else, but now it nicely grows.
Fortunately we realize that they are father and daughter (or we come to this conclusion very early). But then the funnies part when the father tells her: "There you are". This means that he did not know where she was. So the murderer is either the daughter or the other guy who just have been killed. This is important because it really shows the deepness of immorality in this world. Kids are held to be innocent. This means that they cannot be consumers, neither stalkers they are only survivors. If you give it a second thought kid-zombies are quite rare. They are usually adults.
Anyway a lot of tension has been generated so far. This little girl alone in a big dangerous house in a world where none cares about her psychology and the traumas touching her (most of us would protect children from horror movies for example). Two adults were fighting to death (what if his father loses?) and she only has a little knife. And she says bingo when she finds bullets. This again strengthen the impression that she is becoming that murderer
The unclearity of the murder is here again crucial since we just do not know how deeply is she touched by this environment. Could she kill someone? Apparently she could. But has she done so so far? We do not know. This thing reveals I think a really distinguished visual language. 
So far we have not heard about zombies. When they arrive we just feel the urge to take them out of there.
Okay now let us pause again. So far the father figure is very accurate. He represents strength, safety and order. His daughter obeys him which is a little bit over her age but here we have so much extreme psychological factors that it is really hard how would a child's mind react. The usual psychology would suggest that children are not so strong and cannot concentrate so well under stress. But we can accept that she is extraordinary and this can be a reason for their survival. I think McCarthy is much better in this as the son there suffers severe traumas while his father tries to protect him from these things. This attempt of protection gives us much more tension then we have here. Why is that?
Well the last of us type father orders his daughter to search the dead body. We cannot decide whether she is a stalker like her father or an innocent child who deserves a better life. She seems to be a little bit touched by the infamy of this world. She is not the representation of human dignity. And in this case this is a case of failure of realism. Children are usually the passive objects of horror and not participants of it. I say usually since this is a much deeper debate in literature. (You might think of Golding's Lord of the Flies) But whatever is the case about the cruelty of children it remains true that if they are passive objects of horror that has a deeper horror impact on us. Because since that time we are worried about not only their life but about their innocence as well. We just do not want to see them face with the horror of the world. If the girl was slightly less tough I think the tension would have gone above the stars when the zombies arrive.
And when they arrive even the strong father freaks out. There are really nice textures there by the way when he is preparing his gun for shooting the zombies who are led by the smell of the just spilled fresh blood. The thing we all notice even if only unconsciously that there is no escape from here. The are on the second floor in a bathroom. So the only way out is either to hide while they eat the body and wait them to be gone, or to kill them. I think the expression on the father's face is greatly rigged. However it is slightly late still epic.
Then the monologue of the girl and the smooth running-out-of-the-house scene gives us the relief from all the tension we have got. Since we do not know what happened between the bathroom and the doorway we cannot complain about the story. But still we can feel a logical block by the fact that it cannot be a straightforward run from the bathroom to the doorway since the zombies were there between. If they did not kill them they had to run by them. And this seems to be pretty hard. But never mind, since anything could have happened. The only thing bothers me is that the flow if the clip is disturbed by this. We just feel that according to the rhythm it needs to be a run but it cannot be. They must have spent some minutes by killing those creatures. But that does not fit into the overall flow of the film. And this is because the father says to his daughter "Run" while he shots the first of the three zombies. But if she runs, she obviously has to run towards the zombies. The she would die. So they need to shoot to more at least to make it a run. I think even if they shoot some more rounds while we see the dark transition screen this could be fine. Well easy avoidance makes it just a bigger mistake.

The lights and the textures are still between a game and a cartoon but they are consistent and really nice. The models are very detailed and despite the organic ones they seem to be perfect for me. The organis environment is great and vivid (didn't know they have those softwares for ps3). Shadows are just perfect.
The rigging of the animation is nice however the final run seems to be a little bit still dreamlike and some of the movements still seems to be manually animated. If this means that the whole thing is done so that is a great animation but if this means that they altered motion capture, well that might have been a mistake. (e.g. at 1:12-14 when she points to the corpse it is very unrealistic). At the same place I cannot understand the physics behind the corpse's chest-pack. It seems to me made of leather. It is huge. And although a body was lying on it still holds its original shape. I think it should have been creased into the chest.

Scores:

Story: 10/10 (Very well developed set and tension. I really had a ball in my stomach.)
Director: 9/10(Very detailed and distinguished visual communication, deep insights and smooth complexity, great tension pity for that mistake in the continuity at the end)

Modelling: 9/10 (Organic models could have got more details)

Animation: 8/10 (Some unrealistic movements)
Render and lights: 8/10 (consistent, cartoonish render sometimes slides into ingame graphics lights are beautiful and projected shadows as well but there should have been some particle systems like flying dust)
Material/textures: 5/10 (a lot of details are missing and they are definitely ingame style materials - almost complete lack of bump shaders)
Photography: 10/10 (The camera movement is very nice and accurate)
Editing/effects: 8/10 (Edit is fantastic, it is smooth, hardly noticeable but lacks the contribution to the story as well, i.e. nothing extraordinary.)
Music: 9/10 (Not much music but that is very nice, and the overall audio is really good)
Visual concept: 8/10 (Zombies resemble to the ones scene in a Secret World trailer but everything else is nice and original)

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Overall: 8.4

Copyright notice:

Copyright Notice: The video is made available by http://www.lastofus.com's youtube channel thelastofus by leaving the embed option open for everyone. All intellectual rights for the video are reserved for Naughty Dog and Sony. I only claim the copyright for its interpretation and evaluation.
(c)2011 Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC. The Last of Us is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC. Created and developed by Naughty Dog, Inc.