I was really excited to see Fallout, the new Amazon Prime series based on the beloved video game franchise. I'm a big fan of that franchise. On the whole, I'd say I was pleased with the adaptation but I also find it deeply flawed in extremely frustrating ways. Number one being the writing.
I was excited when I heard it was coming from Jonathon Nolan, brother of Christopher. Jonathon frequently collaborated with his brother. He co-wrote Memento, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight, three of my favourite Christopher Nolan movies. Unfortunately, he does not serve as writer on the Fallout series but as director. The primary writers and showrunners are Geneva Robertson-Dworet, whose only two previous credits are Captain Marvel and the 2018 Tomb Raider, and Graham Wagner, whose more substantial list of credits includes The Office and Portlandia among others. Of the eight episode first season of Fallout, I would say the strongest are four that the two showrunners didn't write; episodes four, five, six, and seven. Episode eight, sadly, is the worst of the series. At the same time, I wouldn't say any episode is truly bad.
The show benefits a lot from the premise and extensive lore it inherits from the video games. The protagonist is Lucy, played with plucky passivity by Ella Purnell. Like the player character of most of the Fallout games, she's a Vault dweller, a citizen of one of the massive bomb shelters built to protect a community of wealthy individuals from nuclear war.
In most of the Fallout games, story elements related to the Vault take up a very small portion of the game, usually only serving as background for the player character. The Amazon series revolves almost entirely around the Vaults and we learn only a little about the wasteland communities and power players two hundred years after the bombs fell. Lucy sets off across the wasteland to find her kidnapped father, played by Kyle MacLachlan in a perfect piece of casting. Two denizens of the wasteland round out the main cast; Maximus, played very effectively by Aaron Moten, and "The Ghoul", aka Cooper Howard, played by Walton Goggins. Cooper was a famous movie star two hundred years ago, now he's a noseless abomination, a ruthless bounty hunter.
Goggins is great, of course, and a surprising lot of the series revolves around flashbacks to his life before the planet was devastated, when he was a movie star known for Westerns. As good as he is, these segments are one of the elements that drag the show down. At times I was reminded of Netflix's Cowboy Bebop adaptation in that the greater expense involved in live action productions prevent the show from indulging in the scope which distinguished the source material. It seems clear one of the reasons so much of the show is spent in Vaults is because they built the Vault sets and then they couldn't afford to build much else. Likewise, the flashback scenes, which could utilise more real locations and cheaper sets, take up a lot more time than they otherwise would have. But they also involve a chronic problem in modern television writing, which is the ritualistic inevitability of set-ups and payoffs. If Walton Goggins meets someone at one point in an early episode, the rules dictate that this person must play a crucial role later on. So what seems at first like it'll be an intriguing backstory for a wasteland bounty hunter ends up being his whole story. It's vaguely stifling as we feel like we're being prepared for an adventure but we're really going no further than the front yard, so to speak.
You know what, I'm just going to quote Pauline Kael in her review of Shoot the Piano Player:
A number of reviewers have complained that in his improvisatory method, Truffaut includes irrelevancies, and they use as chief illustration the opening scene--a gangster who is running away from pursuers bangs into a telephone pole, and then is helped to his feet by a man who proceeds to walk along with him, while discussing his marital life. Is it really so irrelevant? Only if you grew up in that tradition of the well-made play in which this bystander would have to reappear as some vital link in the plot. But he's relevant in a different way here: he helps to set us in a world in which his semi-normal existence seems just as much a matter of chance and fringe behavior and simplicity as the gangster's existence--which begins to seem semi-normal also. The bystander talks; we get an impression of his way of life and his need to talk about it, and he goes out of the film, and that is that: Truffaut would have to be as stodgy and dull witted as the reviewers to bring him back and link him into the story. For the meaning of these films is that these fortuitous encounters illuminate something about our lives in a way that the old neat plots don't.
Over half a century later and screenwriters still haven't learned this lesson.
Another problem on Fallout is that, for a guy who's survived on his wits and fortitude, Cooper's shown to be really sloppy. I blame the fact that the writers lack the experience and/or imagination to craft a survivalist narrative of the kind that made the first seasons of Walking Dead so popular. Just playing the Fallout games might have tipped them off that you don't just stroll casually down the middle of the street surrounded by tall buildings and rubble. Might as well douse your head in fluorescent paint for the snipers. No, you sneak, you find cover, you stick close to walls. Not only does the Ghoul fail at that, he's lousy at taking care of his physical needs. The Ghouls need regular injections to avoid turning feral but Cooper loses his stash due to sloppiness. Then, when he finds a big box of drugs, he starts putting handfuls of it in his hat instead of simply taking the box. And then he gorges himself on it instead of parcelling it out and makes himself a sitting duck for whatever psycho gang happens along.
The show really needed more people who understood action.
Okay, okay. Bitching is a cheap thrill. What did I like? Lucy and Maximus are great together, each sheltered and morally preoccupied in their own way. They have good physical chemistry, too, once you get past the tiresome modern messaging about how all sex should be casual and without emotional investment.
In episodes four through seven, the comedy is a pitch-perfect refinement of the games' blend of horror and absurdist satire. A scene featuring Fred Armison as a DJ is a perfect piece of body horror comedy. They should've gotten Sam Raimi for this.
While the writers may have lacked the chops to write wasteland survivalist stories, they do have the right backgrounds to write Vault dwellers. It occurred to me that the western, let's call them, Internet class, the group that's always online and becoming increasingly insulated from the massive population that doesn't give a shit what's trending on X, finds a perfect reflection in the isolated Vault dwellers. Some have said the show is an indictment of capitalism and maybe it was meant to be but, if so, it inadvertently plays a strong devil's advocate in its portrayal of Lucy. She's mocked for her morality that could only be a product of isolation from the harsh conditions of real life. Yet anyone watching will likely feel cheered by her adherence to the Golden Rule. I know I sure was. And that's the kind of morality only money can buy.
Maximus is sheltered in another way, having been brought up in the military cult called the Brotherhood of Steel. As the name suggests, the group is all men, except one non-binary character, a nonsensical bit of token casting. Maximus is tormented by the clash between rigid discipline and ruthlessness promoted by the group and Aaron Moten's performance is perfect for it.
So it's a mixed bag but it has enough good in it I look forward to season two. I really hope they get Ron Perlman onboard. To any fans of the series, the absence of his opening narration is a massive disappointment.
Fallout is available on Amazon Prime.
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