Grounded: Making The Last of Us (2013)
★★★★
This review may contain spoilers.
I've been meaning to watch this documentary for a while now. It is very fascinating to get an inside look at one of my favorite games of all time. It is so cool to see how this thing was built from the ground up and get cool insights. I wish it was a lot more detailed, but like that is wish fulfillment because I think what I want is someone to just make a game in front of me so that I can ask a ton of questions. But that is just because I am so fascinated by game design. But it was really cool to see, I reiterate.
As for the documentary itself, there were a few things that I had a problem with. As far as the length, I had a feeling it could have been at least another hour. We jumped towards the end of production, but that is okay. It still felt tight and condensed, so maybe that is why they did it. I wish we got a bit more insights from Druckmann, even though we get plenty from him from interviews and stuff. It would have been cool to hear more about the writing process, which is something I was really excited to hear.
I was really interested in the lighting section, hearing them talk about the complications that they had from having natural light. Hearing him say, 'Oops, another bug I have to fix, welcome to my life,' was so funny, man. Seeing that guy just walk around and fight people and essentially say that he lives in this endless white void and just punches people was really funny as well. A cool fact that I was also interested in was when they talked about shooting the camera in real life to translate over to games and how they kept the inconsistency, like the cameraman hitting a wall or something or the rack pull being not perfect was cool and a nice detail. Gustavo doing the music was actually amazing. It looked like he was in his element in there and just going ham. It felt cathartic and jaw-dropping to watch a master of his calibre work. There are so many other cool moments like the motion capture stuff, the T-posing Joel, and so many others, but if I mention all of them I will be here typing forever. I liked this doc a lot. Will watch again at some point for sure.
The fact they didn't cover much about the ending at all was crazy to me, but maybe they're saving that for Grounded Two.
This is one of my favorite games, so I am a bit biased, but I still loved this documentary. It gave me flashbacks to playing the game for the first time years ago and scratched a bit of an itch that I had that makes me want to go back and replay the game for like the thousandth time.
