Amazon’s Fallout series has been eagerly awaited by sci-fi fans and the video game community. Now it’s here, it’s absolutely great and a role model for many other adaptations. Nevertheless, there is one weakness:
Video game fans have learned to have mixed feelings about adaptations. Seeing your favourite game as a series is a euphoric promise. But there are so many negative examples, so many botched conversions, that most sci-fi fans probably threw up their hands when the Fallout series was announced. Wrongly, as I can thankfully say. Fallout is an almost perfect masterpiece.
Sci-fi highlight: This is what Amazon’s Fallout series is all about
The Fallout series doesn’t adapt any particular story from the game franchise, which has been around since 1997. But fans will immediately feel at home with the story: It revolves around Lucy (Ella Purnell), who has lived in a gigantic nuclear bunker (Vault) since birth. The outside world is radioactively contaminated after a nuclear war. The Vault Dwellers, recognizable by their blue and yellow outfits and optimistic attitude, are preparing to recolonize the Earth.
Watch the latest Fallout trailer here:
But when scavengers from the surface kidnap her father (Kyle MacLachlan), Lucy leaves the bunker. In the brutal world outside her home, her search leads her to encounter a quasi-undead bounty hunter (Walton Goggins) and a member of the warlike Brotherhood of Steel named Maximus (Aaron Moten), among others.
The Fallout series is not a slave to its source material and that is its greatest strength
The greatest strength of Amazon’s series is clear from the first minute. Fallout begins with a flashback before the nuclear war. Goggin’s character, alive and kicking, entertains children at a garden party with lasso tricks. We see the last minutes before the apocalypse. But that’s not important.
What’s important is how much the series implicitly tells us in those minutes: Goggins’ Cooper Howard is a fallen Western star who keeps his head above water with tricks. Only his daughter stays with him. America reacts to the nuclear threat by dancing on the volcano. The licked host whispers that Howard must be a communist
(Walton Goggins as ghoul bounty hunter Cooper Howard)
This is where the series’ first and greatest strength becomes apparent: it retains its freedom and creativity. While other series slavishly follow their templates and pile on fan service elements, series creator Jonathan Nolan (Westworld) concentrates on creating iconic characters, creating exciting scenes and telling a story that entertains, that makes you shiver and laugh and grieve, rather than containing as many Easter eggs as possible.
Walton Goggins’ lasso flies in slow motion. Panicked and disillusioned, a knight of the Brotherhood of Steel, wrapped in armor weighing tons, threatens his squire with death. “Will you still want the same things when [the atomic desert] has completely changed you?” an escaped scientist asks the naive Lucy. Shortly afterwards, he forces her to cut off his head with a chainsaw. This series has a life of its own that you can’t help but root for.
Fallout: The look of the sci-fi series is extremely detailed
The look of the Amazon series is not least responsible for this impression. The producers focused on practical sets and effects instead of CGI. They shot on grainy 35 mm film, which gives landscapes and faces something heavy and striking. And above all, they show an unparalleled attention to detail in their locations
(Fallout offers gigantic locations)
Every scene, no matter how small, is crammed with objects. Garbage lying around, dust, discarded appliances and machines, colorful cloths and greasy corrugated iron lend life to the scenery. Gigantic ruins, car graveyards in the forest and shipwrecks in the desert lend this apocalypse its dignity.
The Fallout stars inspire as cowboys, warriors and naïfs
The creative freedom of the scripts and the richness of the aesthetics are matched by sensational casting. Walton Goggins in particular as Cooper Howard moves between the warm-hearted family man and the cruel bounty hunter with great ease and believability.
When Lucy cuts off one of his fingers and he simply replies dryly: “There you are, you little killer”, this shows us an iconic character: a figure that transcends the video game franchise and the sci-fi genre. A brutalized, fallen idealist who has learned to expect violence in any form. What a masterstroke. What an endlessly entertaining character!
(Ella Purnell as Lucy)
Ella Purnell and Aaron Moten embody their leading roles similarly well. The one with the wide-eyed naivety that threatens to break the perfidious wasteland. The other as a traumatized simpleton whose ideal of absolute strength lets him down at the first fork in the road.
The Fallout series has a single weak point
The whole thing would be a flawless masterpiece if the series didn’t run out of steam at the finish line. The plot threads are brought together too frantically and the writers seem too proud of a mediocre and predictable resolution. Lucy’s minute-long disbelief, her father’s repetitive begging, a character’s sudden moral U-turn – everything fits together a little too perfectly. It seems artificial and lifeless, as if the makers didn’t have enough time at the end.
Even before that, there were scenes that jeopardized the credibility of the series world for dramatic climaxes. For example, when mummified corpses give clues as to the circumstances of their deaths because they have painted their most pressing questions on the walls with their own blood. “We know the truth!”, “We know what’s in here!” Why is it always the concern of such dead people to inform posterity? It looks to me as if the scriptwriters have gone for sledgehammer images to save themselves the words.
(Aaron Moten as Maximus)
But such scenes remain small details until the finale. Only in the last episode does the lack of dramatic energy become painful, because every fan expects a powerful reward for seven episodes of story build-up. Which then comes across as somewhat average in episode 8
