Video game adaptations are finally starting to impress. HBO’s The Last of Us became an instant hit, taking the dark yet captivating story of survivors in the aftermath of an apocalypse and turning the game into a full-fledged television series. Next up was Halo. Although the series didn’t initially win over viewers, its second season garnered much better critical acclaim. Now, Prime Video is making its own attempt at creating a series based on video games by releasing Fallout, based on the popular franchise of the same name.
While The Last of Us has a straightforward story and two main characters you learn about as you play, Fallout is based on a first-person shooter. Players can be anyone – usually with a mythical nickname – and the games are known for each iteration taking place in a different city and time. Therefore, to simplify and allow the show to tell its own story without the need to adhere to real landmarks, Fallout’s events take place in a new location and time. Whether you’ve ever played video games or are a super fan of Fallout, here’s what I think about this series. So, boil the kettle and settle in, it’s an unusual review today.
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The series is set in a retro-futuristic post-apocalyptic version of Los Angeles. While the events of the video games take place in different eras (and don’t necessarily intersect), the action of the Fallout series occurs 219 years after the nuclear explosion in 2077. In addition to the isolated plot, the main heroine of the series (as in the games) is a “Vault Dweller,” who has lived underground her entire life. As far as the inhabitants of Vault 33 know, the surface is a dangerous, irradiated place unsuitable for life. They rarely venture beyond their safe, self-sufficient homes. This means that anyone born generations into living underground has very little knowledge about the outside world, its convoluted politics, and warring factions.
We also have the militaristic Brotherhood of Steel, as well as the irradiated surface dwellers known as mutants. And almost everyone in the vast Wasteland and beyond its borders is governed by Vault-Tec. In other words, it’s a world unmistakably rooted in the Fallout canon. It’s a loving recreation of the icons of the Fallout universe, but it’s also something more, pushing the entire franchise forward into a new story and a larger world.
The Fallout story mainly revolves around Lucy (Ella Purnell), a Vault dweller who leaves her home to find her father (Kyle MacLachlan). In her travels through the Wasteland, she encounters Maximus (Aaron Moten), a member of the Brotherhood of Steel, a bounty hunter known as Ghoul (Walton Goggins), and a host of other very strange inhabitants.
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The series follows all these characters as their paths intersect and converge in the Wasteland of Los Angeles in search of a scientist who escaped from the Enclave with dangerous technology that could permanently alter the balance of power in the Wasteland. In typical Fallout fashion, this story largely helps our heroes delve deeper into the world of the Wasteland to see all its wonders it has to offer.
This world is one of the things Fallout captivates with from the very beginning. Vaults in real-time have that quintessential American steel-cage atmosphere that immediately made them striking in Fallout 3, with long, artificially lit corridors adorned with cheerful mailboxes and blast-resistant doors. But not on the surface, where the main events unfold. Fallout was shot on location, with magnificent and gritty sets that make the Wasteland feel real and alive. Clothing is torn and worn, walls are rough and patched, and everything, from weapons to technology, seems cobbled together from the remnants of a once-thriving world. All of this takes center stage whenever the Brotherhood of Steel appears in their mighty armored glory, looking terrifyingly complete in their finality.
As expected from a video game adaptation, Fallout is filled with plenty of Easter eggs, but they too feel like part of the world. Everything feels real and plausible, like pieces of a unified universe. Even the graffiti is carefully crafted to fit into the world and the characters’ lives, rather than distracting from them like flashy, intrusive annoyances. But as well-crafted as the world of Fallout may be, it’s the characters that elevate this series head and shoulders above other video game adaptations and most television shows released this year.
In less ambitious series, Lucy’s character could have been used as a wide-eyed, clumsy example of how kindness and humanity can ultimately triumph. But the creators of Fallout strive to explore something more interesting: how can you maintain your humanity when kindness takes a back seat? Her courage and zest for life never die, but her values shift – sometimes imperceptibly, as she realizes she can’t help everyone she sees in the Wasteland, and sometimes more sharply, such as when she encounters a pair of cannibals on the road. It’s a metaphorical journey that deepens the character of the heroine, who could easily have become a boring and naive archetype, as she seems on paper.
Such impressive depth and creativity are inherent in all Fallout characters. Maximus gets a fascinating story about how he comes to terms with the fact that members of the Brotherhood of Steel may not be the paragons of virtue he thought, and even Lucy’s younger brother from Vault 33 gets an intriguing mysterious story about the nature of his Vault’s relationship with the outside world. The series also stands out for its short, quirky one-off stories about eccentric survivors who turn out to be kinder (or crazier) than our main heroes initially assumed.
The only criticism I have for the series is that there’s not enough of Walton Goggins in it. As I’ve mentioned, he plays Cooper Howard, an actor trying to maintain his relevance but becomes a Ghoul, a noseless villain who somewhat resembles the villains he faced back when he was a Hollywood cowboy, after the bombs fall. The action of Fallout unfolds in two timelines: before the bombs drop and after. In the role of Ghoul, Goggins doesn’t hesitate to put a cartoonishly-sized hole in the chest of a bounty hunter, delivering witty jokes, but it’s interesting to watch him struggle to reclaim the fragments of humanity lost within him. He’s not used in the series as often as he should be, but he’s a pleasure to watch nonetheless.
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It’s no wonder that the characters are the strongest part of Fallout; after all, it’s something in between a game series and television. Despite all the merits of the main stories, the true joy of the Fallout series games lies in exploring the Wasteland, finding its strangest inhabitants, listening to their absurd stories and whimsical beliefs, or witnessing their absurd feats of violence and survival. Robertson-Dworet and Wagner’s Fallout perfectly captures this feeling with characters in every part of the game.
While all of this makes for a great and entertaining television show – a remarkably effective adaptation of the series – Fallout’s biggest achievement is how much it effortlessly adds to the world of the games. Most of the deep historical subtexts of the series come in the form of memories of Ghoul’s life before the war. These fragments make up a very small part of the series, but they tell a compelling mysterious story centered around Vault-Tec, giving us the best glimpse into its origins and the political darkness of the pre-war Fallout period. It’s a thoughtful look at how the Fallout world became so ravaged, and it’s all told through the prism of 1950s Hollywood film noir, which would be very fitting as a reference to one of the games.
Fallout justifies its existence by bringing something new to the universe in which it is set, without detracting from that universe. Unlike other recent video game adaptations, such as The Last of Us, which skillfully and elegantly retell the story of their source material, Fallout expands upon it, creating a world that fans have already come to love. The open-world design of the Fallout series complicates any adaptation, given how much content can be packed into the vast locations that players can spend hundreds of hours exploring. But building upon an existing world is very challenging. Fans fiercely defend the worlds they love – which is why for a game like Halo, a separate timeline was created for its adaptation, or why Twisted Metal completely changed the lore of its franchise, which had become a thing of the past.
But Fallout pulls off this trick brilliantly. Robertson-Dworet and Wagner’s enthusiasm for the video game series is evident, but more importantly, it’s their ability to create a good TV show with a well-told story and interesting characters, deeply rooted in the Fallout world, that shines through, all while maintaining the franchise’s signature dark-but-darkly-funny tone.
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Production on the Fallout series began in June 2022, with filming taking place in New Jersey, New York and Utah. Geneva Robertson-Duoret (Tomb Raider: Lara Croft, Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner served as executive producers, writers and co-showrunners. Jonathan Nolan (World of the Wild West, Batman: Inception, The Prestige, Interstellar) and Lisa Joy (World of the Wild West, Peripherals, Reminiscence) directed the first three episodes of the epic series. Amazon and Kilter Films produced the series in association with Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks.
As for names familiar to fans of the games, Todd Howard, who was game director of Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, as well as executive producer of Fallout 76 and the Fallout Shelte mobile spin-off, and James Altman, director of publishing operations for Bethesda Softworks, the company that publishes the Fallout games, are also executive producers of the Fallout series. In a joint statement Joy and Nolan released during the show’s announcement, they said, “Fallout is one of the greatest game series of all time. Every chapter of this insanely creative story has cost us countless hours to spend with family and friends. That’s why we’re incredibly excited to partner with Todd Howard and the other brilliant madmen at Bethesda to bring this vast, subversive and darkly funny universe to life through Amazon Studios.”
During the press tour dedicated to the show, its creators often mentioned that they thought of the Prime Video series more as Fallout 5 than just an adaptation of the video game franchise. And perhaps the highest praise the show deserves is that it is absolutely perceived as a continuation of the game, accidentally transported into another medium. And after the fantastic first season, it’s hard not to be excited for the next chapter of Fallout, whether it’s a new season on television or a return to the video games.
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As much as we might indulge in the Fallout series, its second season has not yet been confirmed. However, reviews for it are already sounding positive. During a conversation with Collider at CCXP 2023, Wagner revealed that the team already has some ideas about what they plan to do in the next seasons: “I don’t know how to talk about it, but I just want to assure you that we definitely do. I feel like we barely scratched the surface of what we even wanted to do in Season 1, so there’s so much more to do.”
I think a lot about the craziness of Fallout, and if we were just to confront everybody with it all at once, it would just be like tuning into Season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, like, “There’s a demon on the couch and he’s just talking about a breakup. What is going on?” You know? It’s too much. So, we really are taking our time with this, and we really are stepping it up. Though, I think, at the same time, a whole lot of shit happens in the very first two episodes. So, it’s both crazy from a narrative perspective, but from a Fallout perspective we’re taking it very slow and we’re being patient because we have so much more to do.”.
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Fallout is a series that revels in its ability to be funny, touching, sad, cute, and disgusting all at once.
And it’s precisely that blend that it captures so well, making it a great addition to the franchise rather than just an adaptation.
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