‘Fallout Season 1’ REVIEW: Welcome To The Wild, Wild, Wasteland
‘Fallout Season 1’ REVIEW: Welcome To The Wild, Wild, Wasteland
From left to right: The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), Lucy (Ella Purnell) and Maximus (Aaron Moten) as they appear in one of the official posters of Fallout.
"What makes a good video game adaptation?", is a paradoxical question that has perplexed gamers and filmmakers alike for a very long time. Film and television as mediums are passive experiences, with the audience only having any active participation in it through the discussion, analyses, and interpretation of its elements.
On the other hand, video games, for the most part, are a medium that requires interactivity. Something is always lost when translating one medium into another, especially when adapting video games into films or series since it will forgo what makes it such a unique form of media in the first place. Though that didn't dissuade filmmakers from trying.
The infamous Super Mario Bros adaptation from 1993 tried to reinvent the wheel, but overdid it to a point that it became too subversive and disconnected from its source material. The only discernibility it had with the original video game were the names of the characters and the creatures.
It’s a sin that has been repeated over and over again by other adaptations such as the Resident Evil films from Paul W.S. Anderson and its Netflix series adaptation, the Doom film starring The Rock, or any of the terrible adaptations handled by the incapable hands of Uwe Boll. Granted, some of these films and series can be fun, turn-off-your-brain entertainment, but if they have to change so much that it starts to diverge away from the games, can you even call it a successful adaptation?
But then, being too faithful has its own problems too. Take for example HBO's The Last Of Us, an almost beat-by-beat adaptation of the video game of the same name from 2013, which, by its design, is a lengthy experience with emphasis on exploration that puts you in the boots of a Lone Wolf and Cub-esque duo fighting across a zombie-infested America.
It is an experience that is very personal since you are not just watching the characters go through the motions of their emotions as they try to survive a hostile world, but you go through it too because you are them.
Therefore, even if an adaptation is competent and faithful enough to the source material, the experience tends to become diluted as it demotes you to be a passive observer who is witnessing a more than fifteen hour road trip across a desolate America become condensed into nine one-hour episodes. So, unless you have not played the game, there isn’t much to discover aside from an unforgettable episode starring Nick Offerman, one that explores the world outside of the familiar characters.
Such are the pitfalls plaguing video game adaptations. Many have tried and failed to navigate it—Uncharted, Warcraft, Hitman: Agent 47, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, Marky Mark’s Max Payne or that weird Street Fighter adaptation starring Jean Claude Van-Damme and Raul Julia (in his final role), just to name a few.
But crawling out through the fallout of video game adaptations with much aplomb, Fallout sets its eyes on unexplored horizons, delivering a fresh perspective on the source material that genuinely surprises without losing the charm that made the games so iconic.
Multiple atom bombs detonating over downtown LA. Still taken from Fallout’s teaser trailer on YouTube.
By introducing new characters to the lore and setting the timeline years ahead of the last Fallout game, showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, under the guidance of Westworld’s Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy along with Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard, were given a blank canvas to paint on a new story that provides easy access to newcomers while offering a new sense of discovery for longtime fans and propelling the narrative of the canon forward.
Set 200 years after a cataclysmic nuclear event has ravaged America and forced survivors into underground vaults created by a conglomerate called Vault-Tec, the series follows three characters: Lucy, Maximus, and The Ghoul.
Lucy, played by Ella Purnell with such pep and charming naivety, is a Vault dweller who brings a brightness that rivals the cynicism of the Wasteland. After an attack on her home vault and the kidnapping of her father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), she is forced to venture to the surface for the first time on a mission to bring him back.
Then there’s Maximus, whom Aaron Morten imbues with so much adorkable energy that you cannot help but root for him despite how big of a himbo he is. As a squire (or rather, a glorified caddie) of the Brotherhood of Steel, a quasi-religious technocratic group obsessed with monopolizing pre-war technology for themselves, he searches for the power that has eluded him his entire life and tries to find it in a bulky, impractical power armor prized by the Brotherhood.
Rounding out the main cast is The Ghoul, also named Cooper Howard, a former Hollywood cowboy with a big iron on his hip. Now a 200-year-old irradiated, near-immortal mutant, he wanders the Wasteland as a merciless bounty hunter, in search of something precious to him.
Portraying him to perfection is Walton Goggins, who manages to embody the contrasting difference of the character—Cooper’s warmth in the past and the icy-coldness of The Ghoul in the post-apocalyptic present.
The three characters’ quests put them on a collision course with each other, leading to a wild tale of (mis)adventures across the wastelands of what was once Los Angeles.
Although the series started off rough, with early episodes ending anticlimactically and awkwardly transitioning to the next, it eventually gained momentum. For instance, the main conflict isn’t introduced until midway through the second episode, echoing the Fallout tradition of lengthy character creation before the action starts.
However, once the plot thickens with intrigue and conspiracy involving Vault-Tec and a decaying MacGuffin, the series never slows down, delivering twists and turns that can even surprise veterans of the games.
A row of Brotherhood of Steel Knights in their clunky T-60 power armor. Still taken from Fallout’s teaser trailer on YouTube.
Even though the writers are telling a brand new story for the show, it still looks and feels very much like a Fallout game, capturing its spirit without making it the point. The retro-futuristic, atompunk aesthetics that the game is known for has been exceptionally realized through obsessive attention to detail in the production design.
The costumes that players have spent hours cosplaying in, especially the clunky power armor, is immaculately rendered into real-life. Not to mention, the constant needle drops of Cold War-era classics featured in the games kept coming back to lend some much needed comfort from the horrors of the Wasteland, which sometimes even lets us find humor in it.
But more importantly, the show never lost the charm that made the franchise so special: the balancing act between the satirical dark humor and the cartoonish insanity of the Wasteland.
In one absurdly funny scene that was briefly shown in the trailer, an injured Lucy, who was abducted by The Ghoul and sold to a criminal gang loitering at an abandoned supermarket, finds herself face-to-face with a floating robot named Codsworth (voiced by comedian Matt Berry of all people).
To Lucy’s surprise and (short-lived) relief, the robot starts tending to her wounds. She thanks Codsworth for taking care of her and not turning her into a sex slave as she expected, a statement to which the robot immediately took offense to saying that such an idea is disgusting and that all it ever wanted was to simply “harvest her organs'', before shooting her with a tranquilizer. And this is just one hilarious scene in a show chock full of them.
A silhouette of a power armor walking across the Mojave desert. Still from the Fallout series.
But make no mistake, it is not all fun and games and it has never been just that. Fallout as a satire takes aim at an America stricken with a severe case of uranium fever, destructive nationalism, and unchecked corporate greed.
It is a satire from which the series mines not only to create tension for some juicy entertainment and gripping drama, but also to critique neoliberal capitalism and how it creates the perfect breeding ground for mega corporations that favor market dominance over human lives while they cower inside cushy underground shelters.
As one character named Ma June said while describing the purpose of the vaults, “The vaults were nothin’ more than a hole in the ground for rich folks to hide in while the rest of the world burned.”
And if the games were not forthcoming enough on who set the world on fire, the show mic drops it in the most heartbreaking way possible in a shocking finale. Under an orange-colored sky, our main characters are left shattered, each in their own way, by one or two revelations delivered in the bluntest of manners—well, as blunt as a show produced by Amazon can be. The finale caps everything off with a promise true to its approach in adapting the video game series: an expansion of its horizons.
Season 2 could not come soon enough.
Fallout is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
