A radioactive wasteland where cruel mutant monsters can attack you at any moment.
An almost three-hundred-year-old bounty hunter with a cowboy hat and a body full of drugs.
A retro-futuristic 50’s world where the American dream has been twisted to the point of discomfort.
“Fallout” is strange stuff. And when Amazon Prime Video makes a TV series of the famous game series, it’s just as twisted, weird and brutal as it should be.
This is a series that will excite gaming fans, that will entertain those with a taste for hard-hitting satire a la the blood-spattered Amazon series “The Boys”, and that will captivate those who think science fiction is best when it sets the the big questions – such as why we humans keep insisting on killing each other.
DOOMSDAY ADVERTISING: Should there be a bomb shelter? Walton Goggins plays actor Cooper Howard in “Fallout”.
Photo: Amazon Prime Video
I myself belong to all three categories above, and can therefore report that “Fallout” made me grin out loud, gasp in shock and gape with delight.
Series creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, together with main screenwriters Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, have created a wonderfully entertaining series.
Doomsday and bomb rooms
The series takes us to an alternate reality, which parted ways with our own when the first atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. In this retrofuturistic reality, which seems to be stuck in an eternal 50s, a heated resource war between the United States and China has escalated into a nuclear war.
The year is 2077, and one of the series’ three main characters, Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), takes us into history in an impactful projection.
The Western actor entertains with a horse and lasso at a children’s birthday party with his daughter. The view from the Hollywood Hills takes your breath away as the atomic bombs rain down on Los Angeles. The silence is deafening.
HARD ENCOUNTER WITH REALITY: Lucy (Ella Purnell) has to consider whether the golden rule is actually worth living by when she has to go into the radioactive wasteland in “Fallout”.
Photo: Amazon Prime Video
Fast forward 219 years, and meet Lucy (Ella Purnell), a sane resident of Vault 33. Gone is the nuclear horror and the fear of doomsday, here, underground among America’s finest, you will only find smiling faces and a naive willingness to stand. This gang will one day repopulate the surface and save civilization!
But things aren’t quite as they should be in Wonderland, and after a brutal incident on Lucy’s wedding day, she must go into the radioactive wasteland to save her father (Kyle MacLachlan).
Here she immediately gets a sharp right from life’s hard school, and now the question is whether she is willing to break with her own values and principles in order to do what it takes to survive.
Bloody fun
Blood splatter, gore and splatter – “Fallout” is made for you to laugh at the raw violence that unfolds.
Jonathan Nolan directs the first three episodes that set the tone for the series, and although he has never made this type of comedy before, he manages to balance the crudeness and humor in a satisfying way.
NEEDS TO BE SAVED: Kyle MacLachlan plays Lucy’s father, the leader of Vault 33, Hank MacLeane in “Fallout.”
Photo: Amazon Prime Video
This especially comes into its own in the character of Walton Goggin, who when we meet him again over 200 years later, goes by the nickname The Ghoul. The radioactivity from the bombs has given him a long life – and a slightly unfortunate skin condition.
The days of smiling Hollywood grins are long gone. And Goggins is absolutely fantastic in the role of disillusioned bounty hunter with a sharp tongue, high accuracy and lack of inhibitions.
When it turns out that both The Ghoul, Lucy and the series’ third protagonist Maximus (Aaron Moten), a gunman in the paramilitary cult The Brotherhood of Steel, are all looking for the same thing in the wasteland, their paths cross in entertaining and hard-hitting fashion .
CLASSIC WESTERN CHARACTER: When Walton Goggins reappears, it’s as the bounty hunter The Ghoul.
Photo: Amazon Prime Video
“You’re me, baby, just give it time”
Whether it’s in the retro-futuristic past or in the post-apocalyptic western-inspired present – the imaginative time color of “Fallout” is a joy to explore.
It’s clear that Amazon has opened its wallet, because the series looks really lavish. And there are so many fun details to notice, both for the game fans and for a new audience.
More about the series
Photo: Amazon Prime
Expand/minimize fact box
- Title: «Fallout»
- Release date: 11. april 2024
- Season: 1
- Publisher: Amazon Prime
- Series maker: Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Graham Wagner
- Genre: Action, Komedie, Science fiction
- Regi: Jonathan Nolan, with more
- With: Walton Goggins, Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Moses Arias, Leslie Uggams m. fl.
Through constant flashbacks, Walton Goggins’ character becomes our entrance to what has really happened to the world, while together with Ella Purnell’s Lucy we get to know the barbaric wasteland.
The interaction between Goggins and Purnell is also very enjoyable. The contrast between the lives the two have lived is enormous, and there is a lot of interesting thought about what such a brutal reality does to you as a person.
In the first half of the season, I have a little more trouble with Aaron Moten’s character. Maximus is portrayed both as a simple, Forrest Gump-like figure and a more cynical type. I can’t quite grasp what the series creators want the character to be, and this is also reflected in Moten’s game.
The tension drive also stumbles in Maximus’s heavy metal boots initially, but this gradually picks up.
HEAVY SHOES: Aaron Moten (right), plays Maximus, who is so excited about donning T-60 armor in “Fallout”
Foto: JoJo Whilden/Prime Video
Deserves to be a talking point
The story in “Fallout” is based on the game universe, but was written for the TV series. This means that there are many threads to the games here, but that what unfolds is new.
It has given the series creators a freedom which they have exploited in a good way, and which creates room for speculation and fan theories.
Therefore, it is a shame that Amazon Prime Video releases the entire first season in its entirety on the same day. “Fallout” deserves to become the easiest talking point with the weekly launch model.
Maybe that will be the case with the second season that the last episode sets up. At least I’m ready for another round in the wasteland!
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Published 10.04.2024, at 3 p.m