They used to say that television storytelling lacks stakes; for instance, characters that were killed off in season two could find ways to return in season four. Death was no longer sacred. Remember Jon Snow? But the same theory could also apply to the television industry itself. No longer does a big-budget bomb like Citadel kill a network’s future plans. In fact, not only does Citadel return, but its failure encourages the production of equally expensive new projects. This week’s Fallout is hardly as irredeemable as that show, but it certainly points to where Prime Video wants to be as a leading programmer in the streaming age.
Expansive and expensive, the eight-part series is based on the popular video game franchise of the same name, but seems to owe a far greater debt to post-apocalyptic cinema such as the Mad Max films and the recent Last of Us TV adaptation. Like that acclaimed HBO series, Fallout also features an epic quest across an apocalyptic wasteland, but this time, the central roles have been reversed. It isn’t about a middle-aged man escorting a teenage girl to safety; it’s about a teenage girl escorting a middle-aged man. Or, at least, a part of him. The most important part.
Also read – Ripley review: Andrew Scott delivers the performance of the year in rip-roaring masterpiece, among Netflix’s best shows ever
The heart and soul of the show belongs to Lucy MacLean, a naive but resourceful young woman who has (literally) lived a sheltered life in an underground ‘vault’. These bunkers — think of them as similar to the ‘silos’ from Apple’s excellent show — were created for the survivors of a cataclysmic nuclear event that irradiated the surface of the Earth over 200 years ago. Having lived underground for all this time, humanity somehow fostered a legitimate utopia of sorts, with the intention of one day returning to the surface to, as Vidhu Vinod Chopra would say, restart. That day, we are told in episode one, is just around the corner. By the time Lucy’s children are grown, it would be safe for humankind to reemerge and reintegrate.
But while a section of society — Lucy’s people — has been patiently preserving civilisation in these underground vaults, a different group of survivors — these are the crazy ones — has been running amok above ground. When Lucy’s father is taken captive by a horde of surface-dwelling raiders, she makes it her mission to track him down, and embarks on an epic journey across the wastelands of Los Angeles, infested by hostile savages, armed zealots, and mutant monsters.
But Lucy isn’t Fallout’s only protagonist. We’re also introduced to Maximus, a ‘squire’ who belongs to a ‘brotherhood’ of knights that wear mechanised exoskeletons and have dedicated their lives to the dogma of preserving technology. In an early episode, Maximus finds himself with more power than he bargained for, and before long, he crosses paths with Lucy. They learn of an object that can alter the course of humanity, and join forces to track it down. But it can’t be easy, can it? Lucy and Maximus are chased in their quest by an anti-heroic gunslinger known simply as The Ghoul. This character, who appears to have walked right off the pages of a Stephen King novel, has the face of an actual ghost and the backstory of somebody that you’re probably supposed to feel sympathy for.
With the opening three episodes directed by Jonathan Nolan, brother of Christopher and a fine writer in his own right, Fallout opens strongly enough. The scale is lavish and the visual effects tactile, although the tone can be a little unpredictable — and not in a good way. There’s earnestness, but there’s also a certain tongue-in-cheek quality that comes as a bit of a surprise. Some of it is saved with sincerity. Certain moments, however, can feel objectively silly. After establishing that Lucy’s human cargo is of earth-shattering importance, her casual reaction to ‘misplacing’ this cargo feels inappropriate. You can’t blame Ella Purnell, who makes for a feisty heroine, but it’s the writing that robs the moment of all seriousness.
Even though Fallout probably piggybacked on the success of The Last of Us, the two shows could not be more different in tone and temperature. There is, however, a sense that Fallout was a more straight-laced ride initially, but somewhere along the Prime Video chain of command, an executive or two felt that it needed to look and sound a bit like The Boys. And so, they went and reshot certain scenes to make them more flippant. But Fallout makes up for these missteps with a series of genuinely endearing flashback sequences that take you, the viewer, to the pre-apocalypse days. These sequences focus on The Ghoul, back when he was a loving family man and a television actor with a burgeoning career in Westerns.
Read more – Mr & Mrs Smith review: Donald Glover’s slick spy series is a sure-fire hit, and Amazon’s long-overdue apology for Citadel
But even before being destroyed by atomic bombs, the world that Cooper inhabited wasn’t exactly like the one we live in — Fallout is set in a retro-futuristic alternate universe inspired by the false promises of the postwar age, when the idea of Americana was presented as an idyllic apology for what had happened during World War II. But as J Robert Oppenheimer would know better than anything else, when people across the world were dreaming of white picket fences, an iron curtain was being raised across the Atlantic in Soviet Russia. The innocence of the ‘50s — much of the symbolism of this era survives to this day — was clouded by the threat of nuclear annihilation. It’s a rich universe, one that creators Nolan and Lisa Joy, along with their writing team — Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner serve as showrunners — are able to flesh out in interesting and inventive ways. But Fallout feels too watered down for fans of the games, and too generic to stand out for casual viewers.
Fallout
Creators: Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy
Cast: Ella Purnell, Walton Goggins, Aaron Moten, Kyle MacLachlan, Sarita Choudhury
Rating: 3/5
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.
