Boom time: whether by accident or design, the Fallout TV show – announced in 2020 and arriving in a binge-ready eight-episode payload this week – is launching at an auspicious moment. After the mushrooming success of HBO’s The Last of Us, screen adaptations of video games have never been hotter or more respectable. Similarly, the lingering impact of Oppenheimer, now forever glowing with Oscar acclaim, means the world has had atomic bombs on the brain since last summer.
But transferring Fallout’s hardscrabble post-nuclear pleasures to the small screen presents a problem similar to Fallout inventory management. With such an abundance of material and only so much capacity, what do you keep and what do you throw away? The good news is that the Prime Video adaptation cannily lifts the franchise’s road-tested production design – refined over the course of six core titles spanning two decades – completely wholesale.
Of course they were going to keep the snazzy blue jumpsuits, hulking Brotherhood of Steel power armour and the vast, clanking, cog-shaped Vault doors that resemble a particularly intimidating Early Learning Centre playset teaching toddlers how gears work. Those are all cool as hell. But there are other visual callbacks to the games in practically every frame of this deluxe Prime Video adaptation, from Nuka-Cola bottle caps to the strangely comforting sight of two-headed Brahmin cows.
Fallout | Official Trailer | Prime Video
Will these medium-to-deep pulls mean much to the casual viewer simply looking for a Mad Max-adjacent streaming stopgap while they wait for season two of TLOU? Probably not, but every authentic click from a Pip-Boy feels like part of a concerted attempt to reassure hardcore Fallout heads that this monumental game series is in respectful hands.
Those fans might have been nervous when Amazon first announced the project would be overseen by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the rising Hollywood power couple whose previous big sci-fi swing was HBO’s sixguns-and-sexbots drama Westworld. That show was absolutely ravishing to look at but agonising to unpack: a lofty jumble of artificial intelligence buzzwords and unscrupulous timeline chicanery. There were certainly no jokes in its antiseptic vision of the future.
Nolan and Joy’s preferred mode of operation appeared to be chilly, cryptic and nominally cerebral. Could that work with something as narratively down-and-dirty but satirically heightened as Fallout? (A less pressing question: during production, did Jonathan ever discuss nuclear cataclysms with big brother Christopher?)
Image credit: Amazon
There are two distinct strains of humour baked into the Fallout games. There is the ironic juxtaposition of pre-apocalypse golly-gosh 1950s atomic optimism and the shattered reality of a Wasteland full of toilet seats and radroaches. But there is also the emergent slapstick that comes from actually playing, where low-level skirmishes abruptly turn into chaotic, cack-handed free-for-alls and raider heads blossom into fountains of bloody dogmeat with the help of V.A.T.S. targeting.
Being funny is a core part of Fallout’s DNA and to their credit, producers Nolan and Joy – along with writers and showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner – have fully embraced every aspect of it. It helps that their lead character Lucy (Ella Purnell) is a sheltered vault dweller who suddenly has to adapt to surviving the Wasteland. Squint a bit and the wide-eyed Lucy acts like someone who literally has no idea how to play Fallout.
Most of the series takes place 219 years after an atomic bombardment flattened California and, presumably, the rest of the US. Lucy has been raised in the pristine Vault 33, a shining model of democracy where she spends her days racking up scout badges in various disciplines of good citizenship. Some day, when the rads have subsided and Vault 33 pops its cork, she is expected to bring civilising values to the surface.
Image credit: Amazon
Her surface-dwelling mirror is Maximus (Aaron Morten), an equally young Brotherhood of Steel initiate apparently trapped in the first half of Full Metal Jacket, mercilessly bullied by his fellow grunts but genuinely awed by the Brotherhood’s military might (embodied by tiltwing dropships and Knights clanking about in bulky armour). Neither of these kids seem truly ready to face the cynical realities of the Wasteland but that is where they find themselves by the end of the first episode.
The world-weary wild card is Walton Goggins as a gunslinging ghoul with a mercenary streak. We first meet Goggins pre-apocalypse as charismatic cowboy turned toothy western movie star Coop Howard, a loving husband and father trying to navigate a Hollywood red scare while the Vault-Tec corporation grows in influence. As the rather more pragmatic gh
