Anna Daniels
Composer Gustavo Santaolalla, who won back-to-back Academy Awards in the mid-2000s for his scores for Brokeback Mountain and Babel, made his first foray into composing scores for video games with 2013’s The Last of Us. That game, which is widely considered among the best of all time, is now being adapted into an HBO television show, and Santaolalla will be bringing his talents back into the TV world to tackle the show’s score. Read comments about Santaolalla’s hiring from The Last of Us co-director Neil Druckmann and writer Craig Mazin below.
Well this is exciting! Beyond lending his incredible musical talent to The Last of Us Part II, Gustavo Santaolalla is joining us to bring over The Last of Us to HBO!
— Neil Druckmann (@Neil_Druckmann) March 11, 2020
Neil Druckmann, who served as the creative director and writer of the video game and will be co-writing the series adaptation, shared the news that Santaolalla will be The Last of Us composer for the show. Craig Mazin, who created and wrote the incredible series Chernobyl for HBO, also chimed in with his excitement:
It’s not TLOU if it’s not Gustavo… https://t.co/kPiBd8zOXI
— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) March 11, 2020
Santaolalla is intimately familiar with The Last of Us. Not only did he compose the music for the first game, but he’s also returning to do the same for the sequel, The Last of Us Part II, which is currently slated to hit shelves on May 29, 2020. (Side note: I just read this piece from Kotaku about the making of The Last of Us Part II, which is worth checking out if you’re a fan of these games.) Here’s a live performance of the game’s theme song from 2018:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMu28fhARig?feature=oembed&w=740&h=416]
The Last of Us takes place in an America that has been ravaged by a pandemic – a scenario which is totally fictional and almost laughably unrelatable. That’s just a bit too far into sci-fi territory, thank you very much. No way anything like that could ever really happen. Ahem. Where was I?
Oh yes, a post-apocalyptic society. A smuggler named Joel is tasked with transporting a young girl named Ellie across the wasteland, since she may hold the cure for a disease that has devastated the population and caused the afflicted to turn into aggressive creatures referred to as “The Infected.” Naturally, it’s not just the zombie-esque baddies they encounter on their journey: the world is a far more dangerous place than it used to be, and desperation sometimes brings out the worst in humanity. Again, I’m just exceedingly glad that this is just a game and that we have nothing at all to worry about in the real world.
Here’s a trailer for the game:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W01L70IGBgE?feature=oembed&w=740&h=416]
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