Fallout review: Video game adaptation is filled with anarchic comedy and cyberpunk chutzpah

Prime Video series might leave non-gamers a little baffled, but for those already invested in this atomic dust bowl, it should prove a satisfying extension of the franchise

“This is the way the world ends,” wrote TS Eliot. “Not with a bang but a whimper.” Well, in the case of Bethesda’s celebrated video-game franchise – and now big-budget Amazon TV show – Fallout, any whimpering is preceded by lots of bangs. This is the nuclear war, initiated in an alternate reality in 2296, which looks like some sort of technologically advanced version of the 1960s, setting the scene for a post-apocalyptic (or mid-apocalyptic, for the pedants) tale of survival against the odds.

Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) lives in an underground community known as the Vaults. Despite a vivacious personality, she’s failed to find love within Vault 33, so is offered up as a trade to a neighbouring vault. “After 10 years of cousin stuff, I’m definitely excited for the real thing,” she announces spunkily, slipping into her wedding dress. But the ceremony has tragic consequences and finds Lucy heading out of the Vaults, into the Wasteland. Thus begins a pursuit of her father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), the Overseer of Vault 33, who has been cast out into the radioactive wilderness. Out there, amid the fallout, she will encounter other characters on their own, inter-related quests: Maximus (Aaron Moten), a squire of the Brotherhood of Steel who aspires to wear the Knights’ mechanical suits, and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a mutant who has been haunting these deserts since the bombs fell.

As the series progresses, these three threads cross repeatedly, with Lucy’s search for her father becoming derailed by a fight for humanity’s survival. “After 200 years we don’t know what’s up there,” Hank tells his daughter, but she, and we, will soon find out. Overgrown cockroaches, irradiated bears, half-dead mercenaries with flayed skin: there is little time to stop and enjoy the view. It’s a world rendered both in vivid colours and stylised action. Creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan – who previously worked on Westworld, from which the show, and particularly The Ghoul, borrows some trademarks – do not let up. Every step that Lucy takes is fraught with danger, adventure, German Shepherds, and Matt Berry-voiced robots.

Purnell’s career is a strange one. Main roles in big American shows like Yellowjackets and Sweetbitter have led, this year, to starring turns in both Fallout and the upcoming murder-thriller Sweetpea. And yet her big screen career is almost non-existent (she has only had one theatrical release since 2018 – Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead). For all that might suggest a hesitation by casting directors to offer her tentpole releases, Purnell is an old-school star of the small screen. Lucy is gutsy and likeable; Purnell is able to capture the wide-eyed wonder and the hard-nosed resilience. “Okey doke,” Lucy announces, as she begins to decapitate a corpse. When Lucy is absent from a plotline, Fallout endures a tonal sag.

In 2023, The Last of Us set a new standard for video game adaptations. The proximity of that release, and its similarly apocalyptic setting, will make comparisons inevitable. But not only are the two shows tonally distinct from each other, they’re also very differently structured. The Last of Us had a cinematic roadmap to follow, whereas Fallout picks and chooses its iconography, characters and plot from across the game series. Gone is the first-person “Vault Dweller” protagonist, replaced by the very much third-person Lucy. The introduction of new, yet major, characters like rogue scientist Wilzig (Michael Emerson) and Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) marks this out as a show set in the Fallout world, rather than the story of Fallout (or Fallout 3, which is the primary source material).

And yet, the constraints of its progenitor do assert themselves. The show rationalises the video game aesthetic by presenting a society trapped in the 1960s, and yet where the Pip-Boy 3000 – a wrist monitor that gives gamers story information – previously felt natural, here it feels like a leftover from a different medium. The cartoonish styling of the Vaults, likewise, comes across as self-conscious here where, in the game, it feels hard-coded into the DNA. The tone weaves between Deadpoolesque anarchic comedy (“I’d offer you one of these cherry tomatoes,” the Ghoul tells his victim, “but you’ve got a hole in your neck”) and more po-faced sci-fi western tropes.

Vaulted: Purnell plays Lucy, a protagonist cast out into a desolate land (Amazon)

Yet Purnell and Goggins – on excellent form in the dual role of a terrifying antagonist and his deeply human, pre-apocalyptic counterpart – just about keep things on track. What Fallout lacks in narrative coherence it makes up for in sheer cyberpunk chutzpah. That may leave non-gamers a little baffled, but for those already invested in this atomic dust bowl, it should prove a satisfying, if not sensational, extension of the franchise – just about more bang than whimper.

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