Suit up and grab your Pip-Boys as James Hanton explores Prime Video’s post-apocalyptic wasteland.
★★★★✰
There is a moment in Fallout where Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) walks past a poster for one of his films, A Man and His Dog. This is a reference to A Boy and His Dog (1975), a low-budget post-apocalyptic black comedy starring a pre-Miami Vice Don Johnson. It is a nice tip of the hat to a film that lent many of its distinctive characteristics to the Fallout universe; underground societies, the wasteland, mutations, and – most importantly of all – a searing, violent, and comical introspection that exposes ideology in all of its naked shame. A Boy and His Dog subverts the apparent comforts of the social and political norms, turning conservatism and nuclear family values into the stuff of nightmares. The Fallout games, the first of which is almost thirty years old, took this idea and ran with it, expanding in all creative and political directions until it became its own fully-grown behemoth. The boy became a man, if you will (and better yet he kept the dog). Fallout, now finally on the small screen after redefining the role-playing game on both PC and consoles, does not forget its history as the video game adaptation ‘curse’ is made to feel ever more like a distant memory.
History. Fallout reeks of it, from the predictable callbacks to the hugely successful games to how the shadows of the past tower over almost every character, scene, and action. The games wear history’s heavy presence on their sleeve – indeed one character, Ulysses, from a Fallout: New Vegas (2010) DLC won’t shut up about it. As Howard himself puts it, the fate of the present in Fallout was decided by its past, some 200 years ago. It is a present that the unwitting, naive Lucy (Ella Purnell) now must navigate to find her father, following a tragedy in her home sweet home of Vault 33. In the same way that new playthroughs of the game invite you to take an almost blank slate of a character and craft them into a moral being of your own direction, Lucy is impressed on by all of the wasteland’s elements as she gets closer to a horrifying truth about her past. Along for the ride is Howard, who survived the apocalypse and now roams the wastes as an irradiated ghoul cowboy, and Maximus (Aaron Moten), a squire with semi-religious military group the Brotherhood of Steel.
Westworld’s Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy could always be trusted to get the look of Fallout’s world correct. The visual effects and production design gel together in sweet rad-kissed harmony, with a welcome preference for practical effects and props where possible (including real Pip-Boys) that make everything feel that bit more immediate to the viewer. Taking most of its aesthetic influence from Fallout 4 (2015) but incorporating almost all of the games in some way or another, everything from the radioactive abominations to the delirious junkyard towns look stunning. The action too is explosive and thrilling, tremendous battles giving way to Western-style confrontations (there is more than one John Ford reference). An undercurrent of hostility and deceit clouds Fallout like a veil, giving even the most mundane scenes a gripping edge.
All of this however is not what is most impressive about Fallout. Even more impressive is how the show has nailed the tone; at times hysterical absurdity sits nicely alongside horrifically bleak visuals and storylines. The dialogue works overtime somehow combining both the grotesque and the hilarious into single moments (“that ass jerky won’t make itself” says Howard, looking at a face-down dead body). Combined with a soundtrack of easy listening, the show captures the mood of the games perfectly while realising that it cannot be a carbon copy. It is absolute delirium for anybody who has played the games and knows how eccentric they can be, channelling just the right amount of madness to make the series both funny and horrendous all at once.
Encapsulating the show’s violent charm is Goggins’s turn as Howard, both before and after the Great War saw the world reduced to a nuclear dustbin. His charisma is at once infectious and unbearable, a wicked smile and smart mouth reeling you in when in many ways he is a character you should actively detest. Purnell’s transformation from a happy-go-lucky vault dweller to a hardened wasteland explorer is made to look effortless, while Moten adds so much to what could too easily have been a cut-and-dry character. His arc takes some unpredictable turns that often get the best reactions. Credit must also go to Game of Thrones‘ Ramin Djawadi, whose score is utterly electric – particularly his takes on the classic Fallout soundscapes.
What holds the series back, just by an inch, is that it can’t quite match the likes of The Last of Us, Castlevania, or Arcane for accessibility. Unlike all three of those peerless shows, Fallout still depends a slant too heavily on prior knowledge. The name of a pretty major faction is dropped at least twice, yet with no explanation of who they are or why their connection to one of the central characters is so important. The ending too, will likely mean nothing to anybody who doesn’t already know what they’re looking at, while triggering a whole raft of questions for those who do.
Despite this, Fallout is still a mesmerising achievement of television. The episodes work wonders to centre the same moral dilemmas inherent in any Fallout playthrough, pulling back the cloak on dogmatic, profit-driven ideology and the superficial niceties of American values. By the time the walls come crashing down in the finale, your jaw will be on the floor. Fallout succeeds because it is a forward-looking TV show that embraces all the different tributaries of its past, both the history it has invented and the history of the series itself. The show can hold its head high as a show unafraid to confront the sorry truth of war in the past, present, and future, having a blast while doing so. And war… war never changes.
Fallout is streaming now on Amazon Prime.
Words by James Hanton
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