“Fallout” finds the fun in an apocalyptic hellscape
The scream was just right — bloodcurdling, if also very funny — and the practical effects crew had finally found the proper volume and trajectory of the water cannon. The idea was to film what might happen if you ripped a man from the throat of a mutant salamander, exploding its guts like a giant water balloon.
All that remained was to decide what color of bile to slather on the actor (Johnny Pemberton) and on the salamander’s many teeth, which nuclear radiation had transformed into rows of humanlike fingers.
Based on observations made during a visit to the Brooklyn set of “Fallout” in early 2023, Amazon had spared no expense to make the show, the latest genrebending series from Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the creators of “Westworld.” So it was no surprise when Nolan, on set to direct that chilly afternoon, was presented with not one but some half-dozen buckets of bile to choose from, in a variety of revolting hues. He settled on a pukey pinkish yellow.
“This is the closest thing to comedy that I’ve worked on,” he said later by phone. With writing credits on films like “Memento,” “The Dark Knight” and “The Prestige,” Nolan has tended to skew dark. Comically exploding monster guts — this was new territory.
“It’s a lot of fun,” he said. A fun apocalypse? Amid all the doom and gloom of most sci-fi spectacles and social media feeds? Yes, please.
“Fallout” premieres Wednesday on Prime Video, and at first it may sound familiar to viewers of a certain postapocalyptic HBO hit from last year, “The Last of Us.” Imagine: a sprawling, expensive adaptation of a beloved video game franchise that features an unlikely duo — a nihilistic old gunslinger with a tortured past and a tough young woman whose mission overlaps with his. Together, they travel a lawless America plagued by criminals, fanatics, killer mutants and trigger-happy survivors.
But where “The Last of Us” had a decidedly serious and heartfelt tone, “Fallout,” in keeping with its source material, is satirical and self-aware, rich with ironic detail. Sets and costumes lovingly blend Bmovie conventions from multiple genres, including Westerns, horror and Atomic Age sci-fi. The violence is comically over-thetop.
That unlikely duo? The man (Walton Goggins) is a disfigured former Western star who, among other things, puts the woman (Ella Purnell) on a leash and tries to hawk her organs. Their overlapping mission? To find a severed head.
“I am still wrapping my head around it to be quite honest with you,” Goggins said during a brief production break on set. He was dressed in the kind of immaculate Hollywood cowboy duds — think golden fringe and a tidy matching neckerchief — that a real cowboy might spit a beer on.
“It’s ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ meets. …” He paused, searched for the perfect comparison. “It’s ‘Strangelove’ meets the ‘Star Wars’ bar.”
Until recently, live-action video game adaptations were mostly a losing proposition for television. “The Last of Us” by most accounts broke the streak. A commercial and critical darling, it earned eight Primetime Emmys in January, and its 24 total nominations included one for best drama.
Such success seemed remote five years ago, when Nolan had his first conversations with Bethesda Game Studios, the company that owns the Fallout franchise. An avid gamer, Nolan had long been a fan. The original game, which debuted in 1997, established the premise: In an alternative America, the postwar optimism and kitschy aesthetics of the Eisenhower Era never ended, only evolved. There was no
Vietnam, no Watergate, no Clinton-lewinsky scandal. Then in 2077, a nuclear war between the United States and China wiped out modern civilization worldwide.
Those who could afford it retreated into vast underground networks of shelters, known as vaults, until it was safe to come out. The game begins in 2161 when a “vault-dweller,” who has never known anything but the Beaver Cleaver-ish culture preserved underground, ventures into the irradiated wastelands around Los Angeles on a vital mission. (Later games travel to other cities and times.)
Several Fallout adaptations had been aborted or turned down over the years, said Todd Howard, Bethesda’s executive producer, who is also an executive producer of the show. After seeing and loving “Westworld,” however, Howard approached Nolan and Joy. He had heard Nolan was a gamer.
“He had clearly played a lot,” Howard said — Fallout 3 especially. “He could speak to it with authenticity and had a view of what made it tick.” (“Fallout 3 was a game that you could play comfortably for 50 to 100 hours,” Nolan said.)
Amazon signed on to produce in 2020, part of an overall deal with Nolan and Joy’s production company, Kilter Films. To begin building the Fallout world, Kilter brought in two creator-showrunners: One, Geneva Robertsondworet, had written scripts for big adaptations before, including “Tomb Raider” (2018) and “Captain Marvel” (2019); the other, Graham Wagner, was a TV comedy writer, with credits on “Baskets,” “Silicon Valley” and 50 episodes of “Portlandia.”
For them it was a “best of both worlds” situation. They had been given a trove of intellectual property to start with, already popular among millions. But they also had freedom to simply craft a good story without worrying so much about satisfying gamer fan police.
“The fans of the games want to hear us say that we take the IP seriously,” Wagner said in a joint interview with Robertson-dworet. “Of course we do, because we like it. But you don’t want to let that burden make it feel like a job. Because then everyone’s watching you do a job, and then it just feels like work.”
Robertson-dworet later added, laughing: “We talk a lot about the (expletive) we’re going to eat for the show. It’s going to be either too woke, too fascist, not fascist enough … “She trailed off. The possibilities were endless.
In a separate video call, Kyle Maclachlan, who plays a guest role in the show, didn’t seem worried. And he knows something about protective fan bases. (See: David Lynch’s “Dune.” Or David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: The Return.”)
“I think it’s evident, when you look at the sets and the production value and the tone of the show, that they’re making a big effort to try to incorporate the reality of that world,” he said. “It’s a perfect place to put a story.”
For all the new material, fans of the game will find plenty that is familiar about the story. The show’s other male lead, Aaron Moten, plays an initiate of the Brotherhood of Steel, a fanatical warrior faction found in all of the games. (They suit up in Iron Man-like robotic armor that, 219 years after the end of modern civilization, is prone to breaking down.) Though Purnell’s character arrives more than 130 years after the events of the first game, she draws heavily from it.
“She goes up to the wasteland, and she finds out that everything she ever believed is a lie,” Purnell said on a video call with Moten. “It makes her start to question everything,” she added. “And she has to make that choice, right? Adapt or die. Who’s she going to be?”
However fans respond to “Fallout,” no one can doubt the creators’ commitment. Back in Brooklyn in early 2023, a set tour with the show’s production designer, Howard Cummings, offered a glimpse of the massive scope. Indoors, a mazelike series of corridors and chambers amounted to a multilevel reproduction of the vaults. Outdoors, a ramshackle junk city included whole buses and the front end of a 747 jet, trucked in from California. The New York production alone had 35 welders working at once, Cummings said.
Unsurprisingly, “Fallout” looks great. Still, all the money in Amazon’s coffers can’t make a show good, and the streamer, which declined to share budget numbers, has reportedly spent hundreds of millions of dollars on large-scale series, like “Citadel” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” that have yet to make much of an impact with viewers or critics. Amid the glut of heavier end-times material out there, it seemed like a refreshing start, at least, that the “Fallout” creators’ goal was to entertain viewers, not pile onto them.
Nolan called making it an “expiating” experience: Coming out of a pandemic, amid global instability and a deterioration of political discourse, you had to laugh sometimes, he said.
“It’s the only way to make it through.”