‘Fallout’: Prime Video Reveals First Look at Post-Apocalyptic Video Game Adaptation
Walton Goggins as The Ghoul in the upcoming “Fallout” series on Prime Video.
With four more months to go before it debuts on Prime Video, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s Fallout series, inspired by the beloved video game, has debuted its first look via Vanity Fair.
Set 219 years after the nuclear war of 2077 on Earth, Lucy (Ella Purnell) lives in a bunker underground as it is still unsafe to go up to the surface. Her wants and needs are satisfied, but soon, she will be forced to go into the unknown above. There, she finds a hellscape filled with mutant creatures and a dystopian human society, which will be really impactful for her. As Vanity Fair points out, this serves as the perfect setup for the series’ social satire.
Ella Purnell as Lucy in a first look at the “Fallout” series coming to Prime Video.
Jonathan Nolan, who in addition to co-creating it, directed the first three episodes, said:
“We get to talk about that in a wonderful, speculative-fiction way. I think we’re all looking at the world and going, ‘God, things seem to be heading in a very, very frightening direction.’
So many of us have such naive ideas, even now, about everyone else’s experiences, and it’s one of the things I love about America. It’s this giant, manic collection of different experiences, different points of view. Lucy is charming and plucky and strong…and then you see she’s confronted with the reality of, hey, maybe the supposedly virtuous things you grew up with are not necessarily that virtuous. If they are virtuous, they’re couched in a circumstantial virtuousness. It’s a luxury virtue. You have your point of view because you never ran out of food, right? You guys were able to share everything—because you had enough to share.”
Ella Purnell and Kyle MacLachlan in a first look at the “Fallout” series coming to Prime Video.
Lucy’s story will intersect with the other two male leads’. First, we have an aspiring soldier named Maximus, played by Aaron Moten. He grew up aboveground but as part of a brutal collective of warriors called Brotherhood of Steel. Said Nolan:
“It’s a little bit of the Marine Corps. It’s a little bit of the Knights Templar. It’s this kind of weird fusion. In the absence of a federal government, you just had all this military hardware lying around. Who would get it, and how would they maintain control of it?
“He’s a squire. This is a drawing on the classic Arthurian Knight legends where life was cheap and you had a squire as long as they were useful. They had to prove their worth, they had to prove their valor and their strength, and if they didn’t, they were kind of cast aside.”
Walton Goggins as The Ghoul in a first look at the “Fallout” series coming to Prime Video.
The third lead is a very interesting and different character. Before the nuclear strike, he was a father and husband named Cooper Howard, but the holocaust turned him into a being now referred to as The Ghoul; he’s played by Walton Goggins, and has survived hundreds of years. Though he has a code of honor, he’s described as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly all in one. Nolan compared him to the poet Virgil in Dante’s Inferno.
In the game, Ghouls are cannon fodder and not fully fleshed characters. Goggins’ version also looks less than an actual monster to give the actor more range to properly bring him to life. The in-universe explanation would be that he’s no average Ghoul. Nolan praised Goggins’ talent:
“Walton’s equally adept at drama and comedy, which is so difficult. There is a chasm in time and distance between who this guy was and who he’s become, which for me creates an enormous dramatic question: What happened to this guy? So we’ll walk backwards into that.
“He becomes our guide and our protagonist in that [older] world, even as we understand him to be the antagonist at the end of the world.”
The cast also includes Kyle MacLachlan as Lucy’s father, who lords over Vault 33, Sarita Choudhury as another leader in the dystopian world willing to sacrifice everything for her people, Moisés Arias as Lucy’s brother, Michael Emerson as an enigmatic aboveground researcher named Wilzig. The McGuffin of the story is an artifact that could change the power dynamics of the world.
A first look at Aaron Moten as Maximus in the “Fallout” series coming to Prime Video.
The series will implement the same twisted humor that was present in the games, with the perfect example being the Vault Dwellers logo, a winking cartoon whose wide smile and thumbs up is a huge contrast with the grey-scale colors that surrounds the world of Fallout. Todd Howard, who was behind the games at Bethesda, and who is an executive producer on the show, said the following about this:
“We had a lot of conversations over the style of humor, the level of violence, the style of violence. Look, Fallout can be very dramatic, and dark, and postapocalyptic, but you need to weave in a little bit of a wink…. I think they threaded that needle really well on the TV show.”
The scripts in the series will follow the same continuity as the one presented in the video games, and Bethesda was keen on making sure everything lined up between the games and the story of the show. Howard explained it as follows:
“We view what’s happening in the show as canon. That’s what’s great, when someone else looks at your work and then translates it in some fashion.” He admits to being envious of some of the TV show’s interpretations and additions: “I sort of looked at it like, ‘Ah, why didn’t we do that?’”
A group looking up at a number of airships in the sky from the upcoming “Fallout” series on Prime Video.
Howard also revealed that it was his love for Interstellar and admiration for some of the other films and projects he’d worked on that convinced him Jonathan Nolan was the right guy for the job. To their pleasant surprise, he was interested and the team at Bethesda was sold when Nolan pitched a whole new storyline within the canon of the game:
“I did not want to do an interpretation of an existing story we did. That was the other thing—a lot of pitches were, you know, ‘This is the movie of Fallout 3…’ I was like, ‘Yeah, we told that story.’ I don’t have a lot of interest seeing those translated. I was interested in someone telling a unique ‘Fallout’ story. Treat it like a game. It gives the creators of the series their own playground to play in.”
A girl looks out at a apocalyptic world in the first look of the “Fallout” series coming to Prime Video.
Regardless of the post-apocalyptic feeling of the story, Nolan insists that they wanted to capture the more fun aspects of playing the video game in their adaptation:
“It’s a dark world in many ways. But the games were fun to play, fun to explore, and I think that was a mandate for us: to make sure that it was enjoyable to spend time in this universe.”
Fallout will start streaming on Prime Video on April 12, 2024.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
