After decades of languishing at the bottom of the genre heap in terms of quality, the rather impressive rise of the video game adaptation still hasn’t yet lost its sparkle to me. With the days of Assassin’s Creed, Lara Croft and (whisper it) Hitman hopefully far behind us, one place where the video game movie has thrived is, unsurprisingly, on television where the increased budgets of prestige TV have managed to do justice to such titles as The Last Of Us and Twisted Metal.
Well, the latest videogame to take the plunge is Fallout, the darkly humorous, dystopian, first person RPG that’s ranked up quite a sizable following over its many incarnations. But a nagging question remains: how exactly do you do such a game justice? Do you hue extremely closely to the original plot, or, much to the lament of Halo fans, do you create a whole new story that borrows major elements from the original source? Judging by the quality of its opening salvo, it looks like Fallout is here to show us the way…
In the 50s retro future of 2077, we are introduced to fallen Western actor Cooper Howard has been reduced to appearing at birthday parties in order to make ends meet for his young daughter, but the shifty political landscape, only hinted at on briefly glimpsed news broadcasts, soon rudely intervenes when nuclear bombs start landing all over the city of Los Angeles.
Skip ahead 219 years to the year 2292, we’re introduced to Lucy MacLean, a bubbly, determined young woman who lives in an underground community known as Vault 33 who have never so much as dipped a toe in the outside world even since the doors closed on their ancestors, dealing them away from all the poison and death. It may be a sheltered life (literally), but it’s a safe one, but that hasn’t stopped Lucy enthusiastically taking on a whole bunch of extracurricular activities in order to be a valuable member of the vault. In fact, this is why she’s agreed to be married to someone from Vault 32 to bring more resources back to her people while finding someone to mate with that’s outside of her bloodline.
However, after discovering far too late that the citizens of Vault 32 are actually all dead, and the people they’ve invited in are raiders from the surface, a bloodbath ensues that sees Lucy’s father, Hank the Overseer, kidnapped and the population greatly reduced. Determined to get her father back, Lucy does the unthinkable and travels to the surface to find him, but who the hell knows what lurks in the ruin landscape of Earth’s past?
Well, for one thing, there’s the Brotherhood Of Steel, a militaristic warrior race who have adopted an almost Athurian way of life and young Maximus us desperate to become a squire to the mecha-suit wearing Knights who aim to keep order in such fucked-up times.
Speaking of fucked up, a gang of bounty hunters given the job of tracking down a particular quarry, take the unorthodox route of waking up a mutant gunslinger to aid them, but this lethal, noseless ghoul turns out to be Cooper, who kills them all and takes the job himself…
And lo, with no expense spared by Amazon Prime, we’re launched into the incredibly enjoyable world of Fallout with a surprising steady hand with a first episode that sets the scene with a smirk in its face and a splatter of blood on its blue and yellow jumpsuit. To be honest, while I was familiar with the rather twisted universe that Fallout plays in, I’ve never actually played any of the games, so in a way, I think I could be the perfect audience tor this show as my knowledge of the franchise means I’m already on the same wavelength but it doesn’t stretch so far as to me anticipating plot points, characters or set pieces.
Anyway, the first episode eases us in pretty gently, firstly establishing the infamous day the bombs dropped through the eyes of Walton Goggins’ disgraced former movie star (more on him later) and the fact that the show spends so much time build up this world that heavily leans into the kind Cold War tensions seen in the buttoned down, all mod cons obsessed 50s. While this intro feels like someone smuggled one of Sarah Connor’s atomic nightmares into an episode of Leave It To Beaver, it perfectly sets up the world that’s due to follow.
The segue into 2292 introduces us to the world of Vault 33 and its denizens of happy go lucky civilians who cheerfully live their lives an a massive, underground bunker that still gives the vague appearance that things are still hunky dory. The result is a whole generation that continuously have a “gee whizz/golly Bob howdy” sense of naivety about whatever lurks above and the episode gives us a painless exposition dump of what life is like as we follow the perpetually wide-eyed Lucy (an excellent Ella Purnell) on her quest to get married (read: laid) with someone outside her limited choice range – fooling around with you cousin apparently is such a teenager thing to do. With brisk storytelling strokes, we see that Lucy us highly trained in virtually anything due to her willingness to learn – well, anything and no doubt this’ll pay off in spades in the episodes to come. However, when that rude awakening comes in the form of a full blown invasion, things suddenly get very, very bloody indeed. I very got to admit, while Fallout is darkly funny (it’s ironic use of cooning, 50s ballads are on point), it’s not the charismatic, Guardians Of The Galaxy style goof-fest the trailer made it out to be and the show plays pretty rough when it wants to.
This is especially apparent in its B plot that sees Aaron Moten’s Maximus struggle through the nasty, Full Metal Jacket meets Excalibur, ranks of the Brotherhood Of Steel, a cadre of commandos that try to keep order with large amounts of firepower and kickass robot suits. Maximus is desperate to become a squire due to a formative experience with a Knight as a young child. It’s the complete opposite to Lucy’s rather cheery existence that sees him absorb endless beatings and latrine duties to hopefully achieve his dream. And achieve it he does, but only at the expense of a colleague who suffers a horrific “prank” involving razor blades planted in their boot and before you know it, Maximus has jumped the question and is selected to assist Knight Titus on a mission to locate a particular target.
This finally brings us to the final member of our very different trio of leads and it turns out that Cooper not only survived the original bombings, but now still lives over 200 years later as a gunslinging, undying ghoul who is unwisely awakened to go after the exact same guy that Titus is looking for. And this is the genius of Fallout’s first episode – it gives you a ton of character stuff and world building, but thus far it’s all incredibly organic and you essentially learn about this world as you go. Yes, not a huge amount of it makes the right amount of sense, yet, but once these disparate weirdos start crossing paths, I believe the show will shift into another gear entirely.
Refreshingly taking it’s time to build up a broken world with many moving parts, Fallout’s first episode gives you the goods while still hinting that the juiciest fallout is still yet to come…
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I thought it was very well done, and am looking forward to binging the rest of the season.
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