Fallout Prime Video’s immersive video-game adaptation worth seeking out
With sumptuous production design, colourful characters and rich vein of dark humour, this offers sensory overload in the best meaning of the words.
The similarities are inescapable. Both are set in an alternative, nightmarish America, where a significant event has tested humanity – and we’ve come off second best. The focus is on a young woman embarking on a journey that could change our fate, our future, while the inspiration has come from the world of video games.
But although Fallout (streaming on Prime Video) is undoubtedly pitched as 2024’s answer to The Last of Us, this is not another 2020s spin on The Walking Dead, but rather something closer in look – and feel – to Westworld.
Whether that’s due to shared showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy is arguable, but there’s a sensibility, commitment to world-building and even characters that bear a striking resemblance to those that populated, visited and staffed Delos Inc’s theme park. However, before the comparisons comes a truly arresting opening. A haunting and harrowing seven-minute set-up that places us in a Jetsons-esque 1970s America facing the very real prospect of the Cold War boiling over.
Talks in Anchorage have collapsed, the US president is missing and even weather presenters are neglecting their duties on air because, “I don’t even know if there’s going to be a next week”.
In the hills of Los Angeles, a children’s birthday party is taking place, fallen cowboy star Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) somewhat half-heartedly providing the entertainment. However, as the hosts and guests gather inside for cake and the kids’ favourite show, Cooper watches with horror as the downtown skyline below them is suddenly illuminated and framed by a giant mushroom cloud. As others join in, the blast blows out the windows and everyone races to the house’s fallout shelter, or any other haven they can find.
Cut to 219 years later and Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) is making her case to be selected as Vault 33’s participant in its triennial trade with Vault 32.
As well as being an active contributor to the well-being of the community, she also teaches US history with a focus on ethics, dabbles in riflery and – perhaps most importantly – has well-maintained hygiene and intact reproductive organs.
“Despite that, I’ve been unable to find a suitable marriage partner – at least one I’m not related to,” she admits.
While cousin Chet (Dave Register) is heartbroken by the resultant elders’ assent, Lucy’s father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), Vault 33’s overseer, knows how important it is to keep the gene pool diversified. After all, there are suggestions that radiation levels on the surface are dropping fast enough that the next generation might be the one that will be able to recolonise. Although he does worry about what they may encounter.
“After 200 years, I don’t know much about what’s up there – desperation, violence, lawlessness,” he confides to his daughter. “The survivors will need to be shown a better way. But I worry that the mean old-world will change us instead.”
It’s a concern he isn’t given much time to ponder. No sooner has Lucy asked new husband Monty (Cameron Cowperthwaite) “what’s your sperm count?”, than he’s stabbing her with a knife, a handy Geiger counter revealing his irradiation and status as a raider.
Despite fending him off, Lucy is unable to prevent the woman posing as Vault 32’s “acting overseer” – Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) – and her crew from killing many of her colleagues and kidnapping her father.
For most of those who survive the attack, Vault security now becomes paramount, Lucy’s urging to send a search party to the surface for her Dad falling on deaf ears. She, though, isn’t going to take no for an answer, even if that means heading into the unknown alone.
With its sumptuous costume and production design (brilliantly realised retro-tech abounds), colourful characters, clever use of choice mid-20th century soundtrack cuts and rich vein of dark humour (you’ll never be able to listen to South Pacific’s Some Enchanted Evening in quite the same way again), Fallout offers sensory overload in the best meaning of the words.
That opening sequence, in particular, is a triumph of sound and vision, director Nolan (brother of Oppenheimer helmer Christopher) keeping his camera tightly framed on faces, as the atomic attack is unleashed in silence.
Sure the various sub-plots (I haven’t even touched on Maximus, the Brotherhood of Steel, The Ghoul and Wilzig and how their stories intersect with Lucy’s) take a little time to coalesce, but there’s an immersiveness to the storytelling and setting that draws you in, helped greatly by our Dorothyesque ingenue-with-a-killer-instinct Lucy (fabulously brought to life here by Yellowjackets’ Purnell).
Likewise, fans of the video-game franchise, which first arrived on home computers in 1997, may bridle at the divergence from supposedly canonical events and the introduction of an expanded timeline.
But, after 15 years of kicking around various adaptation iterations, Nolan and Joy’s decision (with the help of Captain Marvel screenwriter Geneva RobertsonDworet and Portlandia’s Graham Wagner) to avoid simply apeing the gameplay seems an eminently sensible and – on the early evidence of the first few episodes – successful one.
Fallout is available to stream on Prime Video.