The Era of Great Video Game Adaptations Continues With ‘Fallout’

If HBO’s The Last of Us ushered in a new era of standout video game adaptations, Prime Video’s Fallout (April 10) takes that evolution to the next level, so perfectly capturing the look, sound, scope, and spirit of its source material that those familiar with Bethesda Game Studios’ superb role-playing franchise will be over the moon with its every spot-on detail. Neophytes, meanwhile, will get a magnificent introduction to this sprawling saga’s milieu—a post-apocalyptic America decimated by nuclear war—and its many colorful human and inhuman inhabitants, all via a multi-pronged The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly-esque story of survival, rejuvenation, tribalism and identity. Executive-produced by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (they of the superficially similar Westworld), it’s a wide-ranging neo-Western adventure of a thrillingly inventive and irradiated sort.

From the sight of Nuka-Colas, Abraxo drain cleaners, and bottlecaps, to trips to Super Duper Mart, shots of stimpacks, tussles with radroaches, and read-outs on Pip-Boys (large-scale wrist gadgets that provide a variety of useful techno-functions), Fallout the show is literally Fallout the game. Thus, veteran players who’ve expended hours upon hours exploring and conquering the Wasteland will spend much of the first few episodes simply geeking out about the fact that every design choice, sound effect, and blues, jazz, and country tune (including The Ink Spots’ iconic “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire”) has been faithfully recreated and transposed by showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner. The fidelity on display is, quite frankly, astounding, especially since Bethesda’s series is renowned for the enormity of its settings, whose regions range from arid deserts and dark forests to crumbling metropolises, and whose environments are so interactive that one can procure everything from fearsome firearms and tactical gear to spoons, cups, folders, mechanical parts, and children’s toys.

Fallout begins its tale in a retro-futuristic 1950s whose citizens have amazing appliances (such as floating octopus-style domestic robo-assistants known as Mr. Handy) but are living under a cloud of nuclear-disaster terror. At a swanky hillside home in Los Angeles, Western actor Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) begrudgingly performs a horseback lasso routine for a young birthday boy, his own daughter by his side. After struggling through what is clearly a demeaning chore for the former marquee star, Cooper’s world is forever altered when the bomb finally drops on L.A.—followed by subsequent blasts that render the skyline a mushroom cloud-dotted nightmare and, in doing so, offer an explanation for an opening title card that reads “The End.”

219 years later, Fallout picks up with three different protagonists in disparate locales. Lucy (Yellowjackets’ Ella Purnell) is one of many blue-jumpsuited residents of Vault 33, a bunker that’s connected to kindred underground lairs where some fortunate souls were able to take shelter before atomic war seemingly rendered the surface uninhabitable. The creation of shadowy mega-corporation Vault-Tec, Vault 33 is a metallic network of tunnels, rooms, facilities and crop-growing fields, and it’s run by Lucy’s overseer father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), who’s excited that Lucy has been selected to take the hand of an anonymous mate from their neighbor, Vault 32. When the big day arrives, everything initially goes off without a hitch, much to Lucy’s delight.

However, after consummating her marriage, Lucy and her fellow vault dwellers discover that their Vault 32 guests, led by the enigmatic Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury), aren’t who they seem to be. Mayhem ensues, resulting in Hank’s disappearance. Given that their mother died years later, this orphans Lucy and her brother Norm (Moises Arias), and it motivates the heroine—played by Purnell with “okey dokey” naivete that’s underscored by gritty determination—to disobey the Vault’s rules and escape her subterranean home to locate her missing dad in a landscape that’s the exact opposite of what she expected, and for which she’s unprepared.

Elsewhere in the Wasteland, Maximus (Aaron Moten) is a rookie recruit of the Brotherhood of Steel, a cult-y militaristic outfit dedicated to finding pre-apocalyptic artifacts and cleansing the country of evil. To do this, the Brotherhood don gigantic metallic power suits that make them formidable soldiers, and which Robertson-Dworet and Wagner—along with Nolan, who directs the first three episodes—bring to brilliantly hulking life. Maximus is a true-believer as well as a potential schemer, and thanks to a twist of fate that he may have orchestrated, he’s assigned to embark on a mission as the squire to a power armor-wearing lord. It’s not long before fate (and a feral bear known as a yao guai) conspires to get him into that war-machine shell, and to bestow him with his own right-hand man in the person of Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton), who turns out to be one of the show’s comedic bright spots.

Fallout’s third center of attention is its most charismatic: the radiation-deformed Cooper, who’s now known as the Ghoul. Missing a nose and hair, and possessing daunting gunslinger skills and an equally ruthless ethos, the Ghoul is a cutthroat bounty hunter whom the peerlessly cool Goggins embodies with steely-eyed menace as well as deep, sorrowful fury that’s suggested by flashbacks to his 1950s Hollywood life. The Ghoul’s literal resurrection from the grave echoes Lucy and Maximus’ figurative rebirths as new people in a new land, and their paths all soon intersect courtesy of a shared goal: tracking down Wilzig (Michael Emerson), a scientist who’s fled the Enclave (the seat of America’s governmental power) with a strange and highly coveted element that he’s injected into his neck. Mysteries abound, as do encounters with a collection of bizarre beasts, visits to makeshift settlements (including one named “Filly”), and skirmishes that—mimicking the game’s stylistic hallmarks—feature super-slow-motion and gunshots that cause torsos, limbs and heads to explode in great, bloody messes.

Cheer and desolation coexist side-by-side in Fallout, in which hope for the future and nostalgia for the past are juxtaposed with despair for the present—and epitomized by the contrast between the spotless metallic surfaces and sunshiny Vault Boy logos and advertisements of Vault 33, and the bleak junkyard cruddiness of everything and everyone in the Wasteland. From innocent Lucy and the jaded Ghoul’s hostile rapport, to Maximus’ mix of idealism and self-interest, to the ulterior motives of so many of its peripheral characters, the show is rooted in clashes of virtues, values and high-tech weaponry. Moreover, its splintered narrative is at once lucidly plotted and marked by the types of diversions that make the game such fun. As the Ghoul himself cheekily remarks, the Wasteland’s golden rule—which is impossible to avoid—is, “Thou shall get sidetracked by bullshit every goddamn time.”

Like its inspiration, Fallout is a monumental achievement of sci-fi world-building, presenting an alternately horrifying and exhilarating vision of a United States held together by little more than duct tape and Wonder Glue, unflagging optimism and ultra-violent mercilessness. At once accessible and intricate, familiar and unique, it blends brutality, romance, intrigue and wide-eyed awe—and unites man, machine and mutant—to craft a mesmerizing fantasy of the end-times, and all the wild delirium that follows it.