Amazon’s highly anticipated live-action Fallout series arrives with lofty expectations. Executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (HBO’s Westworld) and creators/showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet (2018’s Tomb Raider, Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner (Portlandia, Silicon Valley) are looking to satisfy ardent fans of the Fallout video game franchise as well as people looking for the next big-budget television juggernaut. And to no surprise, pre-existing fans will find much to love about Amazon’s Fallout as this Prime Video original series is custom-built with them in mind. At the same time, though, newcomers will have a strange and dense irradiated hellscape to discover with mutant bears, exploding bodies, and radioactive soda pop.
Touted by creatives as being a spiritual Fallout 5, with Bethesda Game Studios producer Todd Howard also confirming the show existing within the larger canon of the Fallout universe, this is for fans by both the fans and the series’ original stewards. Video game adaptations are currently having a pivotal moment in Hollywood. Between the box office success of Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the critical acclaim of HBO’s The Last of Us, and the upcoming collaboration between A24 and Hideo Kojima for a Death Stranding movie, video games crossing over into film and TV have never been in more demand. Where previous attempts aimed for reinvention and fell short, this new wave of adaptations is sticking to what fans know and love, for better and worse. In the case of Amazon’s Fallout, there is perhaps no recent adaptation that hews this closely to the source material.
Set in a post-apocalyptic alternate future of the United States, wherein the country became a retrofuturistic society thanks to advancements in nuclear technology but eventually succumbed to a resource war, Fallout Season 1 first introduces audiences to the young vault dweller Lucy MacLean, played by Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets, Army of the Dead). She has spent her entire life living in Vault 33, one of the many luxury fallout shelters where refugees fled to escape the apocalypse. Lucy, plucky and wide-eyed, is readying herself for marriage to a man from another vault. Despite increasingly suspicious circumstances, Lucy’s positivity will not be dissuaded. That’s until disaster strikes her vault, forcing Lucy to flee into the outside world in search of her father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), the Overseer of Vault 33, and the raiders who kidnapped him.
However, Lucy’s journey out of her fallout bunker is only a fraction of the broader story the show aims to tell, with a structure that is surprisingly unconventional, if somewhat awkward at times. One gets the sense watching the first episode that director Jonathan Nolan and co. are eager to set the plates as soon as possible and leave the confines of the vault. A choice that makes sense in the broader context of the plot, but is initially a bit disorienting. Once all is introduced and the structure and characters are established, it quickly becomes clear why the series kicks off at this pace.
The first and greatest success of Amazon’s Fallout is its aim to solve the impossible task of adapting a player’s experience of playing a role-playing game. Rather than following one specific character or even a team of characters, audiences encounter 3 separate protagonists in the American nuclear wasteland with wholly different skills, looks, morals, and allegiances whose subplots eventually come together but are designed specifically so that people can choose their own cipher as the story unfolds. With Lucy serving as the show’s way into the outside nuclear world, viewers then meet Aaron Moten (Emancipation, Native Son) as Brotherhood of Steel member Maximus, an aspiring knight whose gentle nature runs up against the Brotherhood’s harshness.
This finally brings us to who will surely be the fan favorite: The Ghoul played by Walton Goggins (Justified, The Hateful Eight), a mutant gunslinger who’s been alive since before nuclear bombs decimated America. Between these 3 main characters, there are shades of the various facets that make the Fallout games so compelling. Even though Fallout 76 is probably the last game fans may want to hear compared to this adaptation, its zanier moments recall running into other players in the vast open world and either finding a new trustee companion or a player looking to cause maximum chaos and trouble for everyone else. It’s this sense of unpredictability that makes Amazon’s Fallout shine even when it needs to stop for its sometimes routine fish-out-of-water plotting.
A dangerous game cast in the face of nuclear fallout keeps the insane action anchored in something tangible while Ella Purnell and Aaron Moten give Lucy and Maximus an immediate, buoyant charm and likability. They two face the tough-to-match performance of Walton Goggins’ The Ghoul, who chews up and spits out each and every scene with a badass, deliciously fun that’ll set screens aglow with his nuclear-level charm. This engaging trio getting into all kinds of trouble as they come across denizens of a wild wasteland, both human and very much not human, is what constantly pushes the series forward with addicting momentum throughout this first 8-episode season.
In a landscape of endless television, viewers often find themselves trudging through a show to keep up with pop cultural conversations. That is not the case with this first season of Fallout — this is a series that is simply hard to stop watching. While the infamous “videogame curse” that had plagued Hollywood adaptations for decades has long since been broken, some consumers have remained unconvinced that any show or film has truly adapted a game in a way that is wholly satisfying and does justice to both mediums. Amazon’s Fallout show doesn’t completely solve the riddle, but it does make progress and move the needle in the right direction. With effervescent characters and a go-for-broke attitude diving headfirst into a terrifying and fun world, Amazon’s Fallout is the bomb.
All 8 episodes of Fallout premiere on Prime Video on April 11!
Created by Jonathan Nolan & Lisa Joy.
Geneva Robertson-Dworet & Graham Wagner.
Based on Fallout by Bethesda Softworks.
Executive Produced by James Altman, Todd Howard, Lisa Joy, Jonathan Nolan, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Graham Wagner, & Athena Wickham.
Main Cast: Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Walton Goggins, Kyle MacLachlan, Xelia Mendes-Jones, Mike Doyle, Moisés Arias, Johnny Pemberton, Cherien Dabis, Dale Dickey, Matty Cardarople, Sarita Choudhury, Michael Emerson, Leslie Uggams, Chris Parnell, Zach Cherry, Dave Register, Frances Turner, Rodrigo Luzzi, Annabel O’Hagan, & Matt Berry.
Cinematographers: Stuart Dryburgh & Teodoro Maniaci.
Composer: Ramin Djawadi.
Production Companies: Kilter Films, Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, & Amazon MGM Studios.
Episode Count: 8.