2024-04-11 13:36:58
By Daniel Grabner
What “Mad Max” is to film is „Fallout“ for the world of video games: the gold standard in post-apocalypse. Since the first part, released in 1997, and its nine subsequent installments, “Fallout” has gathered a loyal fan base. The recipe for success: a cynical view of humanity, a unique aesthetic, a dark setting, deep black humor full of pop culture references and a wild genre mix of science fiction, western, horror and trash.
The “Fallout” universe became richer in backstory, myths and insiders with each new game. Not an easy task to film this. Director and screenwriter Jonathan Nolan (“Westworld,” “Interstellar”), Christopher Nolan’s younger brother and co-writer on many of his films, still dared to do it together with his wife Lisa Joy. Starring Ella Purnell (“Yellowjackets”), Kyle MacLachlan (“Twin Peaks”), Walton Goggins (“The Hateful Eight”) and Aaron Moten.
Best conditions for a film adaptation
If you see the quality of a video game film as sticking as closely as possible to its original, then Jonathan Nolan has the best qualifications. In one Interview he spoke about being an avid fan of the game series himself. So he spent the production break between the two Batman films “The Dark Knight” and “The Dark Knight Rises” playing “Fallout 3”. “I think Chris [Anm. Christopher Nolan] had tasked me with writing ‚The Dark Knight Rises‘, and so if that movie was slightly delayed, it was probably in part because of ‚Fallout 3‘.“
Together with Todd Howard, chief developer at Bethesda Game Studios (the makers of the most recent “Fallout” installments), they quickly agreed: the main character of the series should be the world of “Fallout”. And this world that Jonathan Nolan shows us in the series is modeled on the game template with an incredible amount of attention to detail.
Retrofuturismus à la „Fallout“
In 2077, in an alternative future, humanity is almost completely destroyed in nuclear war. At this point, society is technologically advanced, but aesthetically and culturally stuck in the 1950s. It is an overly optimistic, patriotic America in which nuclear power has replaced all other energy sources. On a cultural level, everything looks like the so-called Space Age of the 1950s with its characteristic Googie-Design. Nolan adopted this very special retrofuturism for the series. Consumer products, buildings, weapons, costumes, robots, vehicles: everything looks exactly like it does in the games. Anyone who knows the games will immediately feel at home.
Fallout
In the first part of the Fallout series we also have to leave our vault.
A ghoul, a knight and a vault dweller meet…
The first season has eight episodes (a second has already been announced), and it begins where many games began: After the nuclear war, a privileged few were able to escape into ultra-modern fallout shelters, which are more like underground cities, so-called vaults. The optimistic pre-war America has been preserved there, grass carpets and garden chairs on the steel floor in front of the bunks, curtains in front of painted windows with a view.
The plan: When the surface is habitable again, it should be the people from the Vaults who rebuild civilization. In the series we follow Lucy (Ella Purnell), who, 200 years after the nuclear war, has to leave the vault in which she was born and raised early and explores the contaminated wasteland. To their surprise, civilization is not wiped out. On the contrary, the Wasteland is teeming with humans, mutants, ghouls and other creatures altered by radioactive radiation.
Amazon Prime Video
It is a brutal world in which the law of the strongest applies. Can you afford to be good in a world where you have to be bad to survive? The initially naive Lucy has to ask herself this question again and again, as she only knows the civilized and optimistic life in the bunker. Ella Purnell plays this struggle of the good bunker resident in the rough, post-apocalyptic world very amusingly. In the second episode she cuts off a scientist’s head with an electric saw – compromises have to be made in the wasteland.
In the course of the plot, Lucy meets Maximus (Aaron Moten), a member of the military sect “Brotherhood of Steel”, which has made it its mission to collect pre-war technology, and a 200-year-old bounty-hunting ghoul (Walton Goggins), i.e. a person who has been turned into an immortal zombie by the radiation. A large part of the series is taken up by flashbacks to his civil life before the war.
Here Nolan gradually unfolds a backstory that not only sheds light on the creation of the Vaults, but also tells of a large conspiracy by tech companies against humanity.
Amazon Prime Video
Also for newcomers
Yes, if you like a brutal, funny and colorful mix of styles with elements from westerns, science fiction and trash. The series is largely exaggerated, bizarre and surprising, but also has its serious, truthful moments: when, right at the beginning of the film, a young girl observes the first mushroom cloud of the beginning of the war or Lucy learns of her mother’s cruel fate.
Jonathan Nolan has succeeded in transferring the spirit of video games to the film medium. After “The Last Of Us,” “Fallout” is another video game adaptation worth seeing. For those unfamiliar with the games, the series is a good introduction to the world of Fallout that you can explore after binging the games.
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