Boom times: Whether by accident or design, the Fallout TV show, announced in 2020 and launching eight episodes this week, is launching at an auspicious time. Following the huge success of HBO’s The Last of Us, video game movie adaptations have never been more popular or revered. Likewise, the lingering influence of Oppenheimer, now forever shone with Oscar acclaim, means that since last summer the world’s brain has been exposed to the effects of the atomic bomb.
But translating Fallout’s grueling post-nuclear fun to the small screen creates issues similar to Fallout’s inventory management. Materials are so abundant but capacity is limited. What do you keep and what do you throw away? The good news is that Prime Video’s adaptation deftly elevates the series’ tried-and-true production design (refined over the course of six core games spanning two decades) to a completely improved level across the board.
Of course, they’ll keep their snazzy blue jumpsuits, bulky Brotherhood of Steel power armor, and giant, clanking gear-shaped vault doors that resemble a particularly intimidating Early Learning Center playset, Teach young children how gears work. These are so cool. But in nearly every frame of this deluxe Prime Video adaptation, there are other visual callbacks to the game, from Nuka-Cola bottle caps to the oddly comforting sight of a two-headed Brahman cow.
Are these mid-to-deep pulls significant to casual viewers looking for a Mad Max-adjacent streaming stopgap while waiting for se ason 2 of TLOU? Maybe not, but every authentic click of Pip-Boy feels like a coordinated attempt to reassure die-hard Fallout fans that this monumental game series is in respectable hands.
Those fans may have been nervous when Amazon first announced that the project would be overseen by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, a rising Hollywood power couple who previously starred in HBO’s six-gun and sex-robot drama Westworld , their previous sci-fi blockbuster. The show is absolutely mesmerizing to watch, but painful to unravel: a towering mess of artificial intelligence buzzwords and unscrupulous timeline deception. Its optimistic vision of the future is certainly no joke.
Nolan and Joy’s preferred mode of operation seems to be aloofness, mystery, and nominal sanity. Would this work with something like Fallout, which has a cheesy narrative but high levels of satire? (A less pressing question: Did Jonathan ever discuss the nuclear apocalypse with Big Brother Christopher during production?)
There are two completely different styles of humor incorporated into the Fallout games. Ironically, the pre-apocalyptic atomic optimism of the 1950s coexists with the shattered reality of a wasteland filled with toilet seats and cockroaches. But there are also some slapstick moments when actually playing the game, with low-level skirmishes suddenly turning into chaotic, ham-fisted melees and, with the help of VATS targeting, predator heads turning into fountains of bloody dogmeat.
Funny is a core part of Fallout’s DNA, and to their credit, producers Nolan and Joy, as well as writers and showrunners Geneva Robertson-Deworet and Graham Wagner, fully embrace it every aspect of it. It helps that their main character, Lucy (Ella Purnell), is a sheltered shelter dweller who suddenly must adapt to surviving in the wasteland. Squinting and wide-eyed, Lucy acts like someone who has no idea how to play Fallout.
Most of the show takes place 219 years after an atomic bomb leveled California (and presumably the rest of the United States). Lucy grew up in the original Vault 33, a shining example of democracy, where she spent days earning her Boy Scout badge in various good citizenship drills. One day, when the radiation subsides and Vault 33 pops its cork, she will hopefully bring civilization’s values to the surface.
Her surface mirror is Maximus (Aaron Morten), an equally young new member of the Brotherhood of Steel who was apparently trapped in the first half of Full Metal Jacket and was bullied mercilessly by his peers , but are truly in awe of the Brotherhood’s military prowess (embodied in the clanking of tilt-wing transport ships and knights in hulking armor). Neither kid really seems ready to face the cynical reality of the wasteland, but that’s where they find themselves at the end of the first episode.
The world-weary wild card is Walton Goggins, who plays a gunslinging ghoul with mercenary motives. We first meet Goggins as a charismatic pre-apocalyptic cowboy turned toothy Western movie star Coop Howard, a loving husband and father in As Vault-Tec’s influence grew, it attempted to counter the Red Scare in Hollywood. A rather pragmatic ghoul, Goggins is a ruthless, self-entertain ing killer who still exudes malevolence even beneath his heavy prosthetics and unique CGI nose job.
If “The Wire” co-star Timothy Olyphant has made a career out of playing lanky cowboys — most recently a sharpshooting space marshal in “The Mandalorian” — Goggins is delighted. A chance to play Clint in a tattered duster. His thick, custom-made ammo belts help lock in Fallout’s unstable survival tone, punctuated by sudden and horrifying bursts of ultra-violence. He also gets most of the best lines, like his well-known golden rule of the wasteland: “You’re going to get sidetracked by bullshit every damn time.”
All three characters search for a MacGuffin in the ruins of California, and while their loyalties change depending on the situation, their motivations at every turn are still refreshing to watch. Fallout’s main mystery, aside from a major mid-season kerfuffle, is – how did it all happen? – There’s a buzz in the background during Coop’s flashback, with Lucy’s little brother Norm (Moises Arias) staying behind to pick at the picket fence utopia of Vault 33 .
Whether this incarnation of Fallout is for you will likely depend on whether you can roll with its whiplash tonal changes. At times, it looks like the most gorgeous widescreen, windswept desert sci-fi: You could easily splice together a trailer to rival Dune: Part II. But this epic tone is constantly undercut by Mr. Bean-esque disasters: limbs blown off, bouts of projectile vomiting, sneak attacks by terrifying wasteland wildlife. One episode begins with newborn puppies being thrown into an incinerator, just in case you weren’t sure who the bad guys were.
If it hadn’t been for the huge success of the equally creepy The Boys , maybe Prime Video wouldn’t have gone along with all the splattering and swearing. But Fallout’s surprisingly subtle thing is that, aside from the odd slow-motion shootout, brutality rarely feels like the point. Most leaders do seem to do their best under difficult circumstances.
In recent years, streaming comedies from “Boys” to “Preacher” and “The Peacemaker” have been rife with violence. But ultimately what Fallout reminds me of is Dungeons & Dragons: Thieves’ Honor, a hilarious movie with lovable characters that manages to evoke the improvisational spirit of actually playing Dungeons & Dragons. Fallout does something similar, with its gory scenes reminiscent of the unexpected upgrades that often occur in games. What a lovely surprise if it was blood splatter.
Fallout Season 1 High quality video Starting April 11th.
