War Never Changes: The Fear of Adapting "Fallout"
Reviewing Amazon's elaborate new post-apocalyptic series.
Few things remind me that I’m aging quite like Fallout does.
Its transformation from a rare game that shipped in a big box that your uncle played in the 90s to pop culture fixture is strange to me still. Honestly, it’s made reconciling my thoughts about Amazon’s new show difficult. Through the eyes of my teenaged nostalgia, it still doesn’t feel like a property destined for an elaborate production like this with a nine-digit budget and a Nolan brother at the helm.
Fallout, the show, is enjoyable fun. It’s a mood piece, an action-adventure and thrilling exploration. It’s darkly funny like the games. With a very high budget, it portrays the idiosyncrasies of the games in both theme and mechanics. It builds a plausible world with lots of texture and a dark sense of humor. It’s a series that makes a huge to-do about adhering to canon while inevitably receiving flak from the most hardcore fans about the inconsistencies it creates along the way.
Because of course.
Fallout, the role-playing game series, explores the cruel world that develops after nuclear war bleaches the planet almost entirely clean of human existence. A privileged few hiding in deep underground vaults dream of one day reaching up to reclaim the world from the madness that they are ignorant of.
Or are they?
The series is uniquely American in its exploitation of Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation; fears perched on the fact that for decades, Soviets and Americans built world-ending nuclear weapons and pointed them at each other in a pact of mutually assured destruction. It forced us to live in the vague tension that at any moment, our entire civilization could be wiped away in a hot flash of light by an itchy hair-trigger.
Even as the Soviet Union collapsed and the potential of nuclear war leaked out of the reality pool, my dad made sure I was uniquely aware of what could have been by exposing my brother and me to films that explored its horrors. WarGames explored how an errant AI could accidentally trigger the apocalypse. A post-Wrath of Khan Nicholas Meyer crafted the ABC mini-series The Day After to explore the radiated horror of life in Kansas City after it’s blown to bits by atomic hellfire.
When Interplay shipped the original Fallout to shelves in 1997 in a big PC game box, my dad snatched it up. Over summers and school breaks, I’d secretly install the M-rated game and wander its violent wasteland. The series had a few sequels and spin-offs, but for nearly a decade, it was an obscure treasure lapped up exclusively by computer nerds like me. It’s a fate similar to that of its spiritual predecessor, Wasteland.
Interplay failed financially and the rights to the series were up in the air. Printing money with Elder Scrolls games, publisher Bethesda snatched them up and with 2007’s Fallout 3, the series was re-introduced to millions with elaborate production values, a first-person view more palatable to gamers and Academy Award-nominated actor Liam Neeson as your dad.
Even as Bethesda was extremely loyal to its source materials, its twists and additions to the universe are apparent in the show to long-time fans like myself. But there was a time when I was resentful of the many new fans that Bethesda brought to the Fallout universe when I shouldn’t have been. I was there in the beginning when it was new and fresh, built by a team of, at its peak, 30 people. Years later, those new fans embraced Fallout 3’s overly grim tone and drab green aesthetic that I despised, then complained when Fallout 4 re-united the colorful highlights and lighter tones of the original games that I loved.
But I am older now and so are they. Fallout has been in Bethesda’s care far longer than it was ever in Interplay’s. My only advantage here, really, is that I was born earlier, a choice I could never have made myself.
Sometimes the choices that fanboys can’t make is all they have to distinguish themselves from other passionate lovers of the things they enjoy.
The Amazon series requires no pre-loading of series lore. Across eight episodes, it follows a cast of individual questers — as well as their corresponding factions — who seek a world-changing macguffin for their own ideological reasons.
Lucy (Ella Purnell) is a young, naïve vault dweller who escapes her underground bunker in hopes of finding her kidnapped father, its Overseer (Kyle MacLachlan), after raiders infiltrate and murder a portion of their population. Maximus (Aaron Moten) is an initiate of the Brotherhood of Steel, a military-like entity that seeks to rebuild the world with technology and a religious zeal. Walton Goggins portrays Cooper Howard, a typecast cowboy actor in a retro-futuristic Hollywood, as well as a drug-addled ghoul he becomes in the apocalypse as the show ping-pongs between the events that lead to the apocalypse and the post-apocalypse itself. Over roughly eight hours, these characters mix, mingle and grow as they are subjected to the new world’s worst horrors.
As my girlfriend and I sat in silence in the late night as the final credits rolled, I struggled to judge it. I mean, I enjoyed it, I had a good time. But its not just a show: it’s a video game adaptation; its story is built on a firmly established canon; it’s an extension of a nostalgic childhood experience. It’s set in the ruins of Los Angeles, the same slice of the world that the original game introduced us to three decades ago. The action sequence in which Lucy leaves her vault probably cost as much as the entire $3 million budget of the original game in the mid-90s.
Watching Fallout had a weight to it. I imagine Marvel Cinematic Universe fans feel the same way about the newest Marvel whatever. How can you truly judge the latest Ant-Man or Doctor Strange movie without the context of the three or four contemporary movies and TV series around it?
This show was as elaborate as any new game, which would wring 50+ hours out of me with a controller in-hand. It felt strangely natural and intensely stupid to weigh the show this way and not on its own merits, but it was inevitable considering its connectivity with the rest of the Fallout universe.
But this Fallout series has to follow the rules of linear narrative. It introduces new questions about the universe while explaining away, maybe too much so, Vault-Tec’s hyper-capitalist ambitions about the end of the world with its network of vaults, each an individual social experiment. It’s character focused in a way that feels very zoomed in compared to the games, something it dances around by having several main characters in different locations simultaneously. As the final episode reached a climax, I almost expected a button prompt to appear at the end of a lengthy, expository scene to select my choice about how to end the show. Maybe I could set a save point to reload to where I could make the other choice.
If it feels like I haven’t truly reached a conclusion with my thoughts on this series, that makes two of us.
Also, I’m trying to avoid spoilers.
When Fallout released in 1997, gamers wanted Hollywood to make movie adaptations of their favorite games. Why? Because movies were a mature medium and a mature adaptation of a juvenile medium could potentially expose millions of people to the treasured cultural touchpoints that they loved.
But when Hollywood did adapt a video game into a movie back then, they fucked up over and over because the games weren’t of a high enough fidelity to adapt and the producers didn’t understand the games to begin with. Ultimately, they made films that satisfied neither the creators nor the fans and for many years, decades even, the idea of making a movie out of a video game seemed impossible. The properties that did make the transition stank horribly.
As video games have flourished and a generation of video gaming filmmakers have grown to control the levers of what gets produced, adaptations have become more and more successful and satisfying. They’ve become less like a beg or a plead to enjoy some obscure thing and more of an elaborate, faithful extension for them. Fallout is one of these. This series looks better any movie of any budget could have been produced in 1997 when Fallout was nearly last in line for this kind of adaptation.
For all of its fidelity and fun, it’s not without its flaws. It’s an exhausting binge, should you choose to consume the series this way. Vault dwellers are portrayed as more gullible idiots than I recall from the games, the comic relief didn’t quite work for me at times and the ending wraps up the series a bit too nicely for all the elaborate setup it does to get you there. It begs for a second season or a new game that are no doubt years away.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: go watch Fallout.