The American film industry has thrown out another piece of video game-turned-series content: since April, the decades-old Fallout dominates the streaming interface of Prime Video – at the same time, it thematizes and collects the video game subculture for praise or criticism. Thanks to good actors, respect for the source material, and an extremely entertaining plot, Fallout is able to catch the success of The Last of Us. At the same time, it proves that the performance of American songs of the fifties can be enjoyed even during a nuclear war.
The end of the world is also just a product that, if we are able to accept it, a bright future awaits us
– an exchange of ideas takes place between two actors sitting by the pool in Hollywood, imbued with communist fears, who discuss how one of them sold his voice to a newly developed robot.
THE Fallout When the video game was released in 1997, this was exactly what its creators had in mind. The essence of the post-apocalyptic role-playing game is the retrofuturistic future, which, despite its plot taking place in the 2100s, is stuck in the aesthetics of the fifties, and in the elementary fear of the Cold War. The game itself has had several episodes and spin-offs, and it has placed the player in an environment (after a nuclear disaster) that he never wants to experience in reality, but curiosity still reigns supreme.
THE Fallout became a worldwide success, an entertainment industry product that was always able to top the sales charts, but at the same time it remained what it was: a video game manifesto that was naturalistic, imbued with black humor, and that deeply despised war.
And was the American serial market able to shape this into a motion picture? Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan his younger brother did everything for this with his wife, who also works in industry, Lisa With Joy.
Bethesda Softworks, which developed the games, trusted the younger Nolan, if only because he had a specific vision of how to make the game compatible with TV viewers. Falloutfive. The caution was no accident: Pete Hines former marketing manager threw a lot of adaptations into the fire, since until then – let’s say, a The Last of Usuntil – it was typical that turning the milieu of video games into a motion picture was a huge risk.
They paid great attention to the foundations, and Todd Howard, the head of Bethesda also found himself in the production team. Amazon embraced the entire project with a $153 million tailwind, and the eight-episode series was created by different directors, as is the fashion these days. Nolan was responsible for the first three parts, while the rest were directed by Hollywood’s decent industrialists.
The end result was above average.
Without revealing too much about the plot, it is worth clarifying the basics: we pick up the thread in America in 2077, where the Third World War is about to break out. We don’t know who and why, but Hollywood actor Cooper Howard, who has seen better days (Walton Goggins in his brilliant performance) is trying to get his daughter out of a children’s court on horseback, while Los Angeles begins to be destroyed by the growing mushroom cloud in the distance.
The plot jumps forward 219 years to meet Lucy (Ella Purnell, you can read our portrait of him here), who lives his everyday life in a shelter called Asylum, while above his head, in the wasteland, radioactive radiation, mutants and the remaining, animalized group of humanity make sure that no one wants the safe, artificial and sufficiently low-stimulus to escape from the bunker. But one day, a gang from the surface breaks into the Asylum, Lucy’s father is kidnapped, and our main protagonist is on their trail. The bunker-dweller played by Purnell is clear Fallout-protagonist: naive, believes in an ideal, and views everything beyond the Asylum with sufficient skepticism.
The plot of the series follows three stories, which – hardly to anyone’s surprise – gradually come into contact with each other. The young Denzel Washington physically fit Aaron Moten Maximus has another thread in the series: he is a soldier of the so-called Brotherhood of Steel, who try to maintain order in the Wasteland in three-meter-high armor – and we feel that their high priest-like leaders, over eighty years old, do not necessarily strive for peace in the disintegrated society.
But among the three plot lines, Cooper’s is the one that will make video game fans drool: the former actor somehow survived the nuclear disaster, and now he has turned into a noseless, terrifying deformed child – a ghoul – whose soul is in a worse condition than his body. The protagonist, who evokes the golden age of real Hollywood westerns, does not spare anyone on the surface, and the creators of the series skillfully give the viewer his memories: we always learn a little more about Cooper, we think we understand his motivations, and you can peek out from under his skin distorted by radiation.
Goggins, who plays him, also has a big role in this, and with his acting, he proves that his abilities go beyond supporting roles. The excellent actor dominates the screen, but does not overshadow Purnell and Moten either.
And this praises the makers’ good sense of proportion.
The brilliance of the actors is complemented by excellent world creation: a Falloutit’s really good to look at, you can see the millions of dollars spent on it, and those who know video games can count the easter eggs in abundance in the nearly one-hour episodes. The overextended playing time is a clear deficit of the series: there is a lot of idle time, when the plot slows down and the viewer’s attention is focused on poorly written, uninteresting characters. Video game storytelling is not easy to adapt to TV anyway, it is mission-oriented and strong as a role-playing game Fallout he is not a grateful subject for this: the proportions are sometimes skewed, and the directors’ hand is not always soft and surely controlled, but the end result provides pleasant relaxation even without prior training as a video gamer.
At the same time, the black humor characteristic of the game will not appeal to everyone: viewers will frown when Lucy tells her cousin in the middle of the first part that she is tired of messing with him. It gets away with plenty of grotesque scenes, but at the same time, the mindless banter has been decently transplanted from the base work. This is accompanied by the typical fifties music, which does not become nerve-racking even after eight episodes, and in fact, fits very nicely with certain scenes.
This is supported by the correct CGI and the award-winning work of the mask masters Fallout it wasn’t a waste of money, in fact, it’s another proof that the American film industry recognized and already understands the power of video games. It is almost certain that HBO and the The Last of Us also for his courage, but we can only be happy if this was what it took to a Falloutseries like get attention.
Fortunately, expectations did not overwhelm the series, even though it was already certain before the season premiered that there would be a sequel. With great actors and a non-offensive video game aesthetic, the Nolans achieved that the Fallout don’t be an easily forgettable series. To make it so, everyone did their part.
Fallout (available in Hungarian on Prime Video), 2024, 8 episodes, 24.hu: 8/10
