Millions of nerds everywhere have been graced with a Prime Video adaptation of the Fallout games and it’s a total blast (pun fully intended, and yes, the Guardian writer linked here used it too — how could she not?).
As a fan of the games, made by Bethesda, I was naturally nervous. I’m the type of person who owns a framed Nuka-Cola poster. I reverently introduced my son to the Fallout universe earlier this year (his verdict: it’s “very vintage” but “pretty cool”). WHAT IF AMAZON SCREWED EVERYTHING UP.
Well, Amazon didn’t screw up. Besides its stars’ amazingly witty performances, the new Fallout, much like the games, provides plenty of social commentary, whether it’s on psychopathic corporate greed or what it means to be an American or what it means to try to save the world. It also somehow managed to make a noseless ghoul, played by Walton Goggins, sexy.
No, I don’t really get it either. I’m just going with it.
It was really good to see Kyle MacLlachlan have a major role in the Fallout adaptation, because he is a Twin Peaks star, and Fallout contains the same wryness to the dark aspects of living in America that David Lynch does, except it’s loud, and action-packed, and artful in a very accessible way.
What I also love about the Fallout adaptation is that it fully embraces the bizarre. Executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy could have gone with a safe and anodyne narrative. Instead, they crafted a first season that lets you enjoy the weirder aspects of the games, all of that theatrical brutality and cackling humor and casual tragedy, while telling a tense and compelling story.
The American experiment has always pondered its own end. Fallout taps into these ponderings without dragging the viewer (or the gamer) into nihilism. It doesn’t hate its characters. It taps into both horror and the human need to believe in something bigger than themselves.
I recently had a big argument with someone who wanted me to hate myself because I am a naturalized American, an American by choice. I’m used to this sentiment, and I’m used to these arguments, but they only reinforce my love for the United States, though it can be a dangerous love, a gory one, as any real American knows. It’s rare to find a TV show that takes the subject of that love and treats it as a warning, but like a really fun warning. This Fallout adaptation didn’t just make me think, it also made me feel.
We live in an age of constant hot takes, wherein it’s really, really easy to shit on other people’s work. The hot-take economy demands it. So it’s been really cool to see a bunch of other video game fans embrace the adaptation, enjoy it, analyze it, and debate it, without much of the usual drama that accompanies such major releases. Maybe there was some drama out there, but I didn’t look for it. I was too busy being riveted.
Apocalyptic narratives can be tricky to pull off. The best ones are dark and scary, but also contain a glimmer of hope. Even Cormac McCarthy’s haunting post-apocalyptic nightmare, The Road, allowed some room for hope. Fallout makes fun of itself quite a bit, and it’s tonally very different, but I believe it’s on the same level of narrative mastery. It’s noisy and deep at the same time, a perfect concoction of mysterious snake oil.
People often scoff at the idea of television and video games as art, but Fallout is a great example of that art, existing now in both mediums. It continuously starts a flame in my heart.