Fallout (2024) is an action drama series based on the role-playing video game franchise of the same name. The series is streaming on Prime Video.
Story
In the year 2077, the United States is embroiled in a resource war and the victim of a full-scale nuclear attack.
Select individuals sheltered in underground fallout bunkers called “vaults” created by Vault-Tec so that they could prepare to repopulate the surface once it was safe again.
However, circumstances force Lucy Maclean, a vault dweller, to head out onto the surface and traverse the wasteland to rescue her father.
What she encounters out there turns everything she ever knew about the world upside down.
Performances
Ella Purnell is a fun primary protagonist in the series. Her character’s naivety and optimism mesh well with the lawlessness of the wasteland.
Purnell handles Lucy’s arc from a pure vault dweller to a hardened surface dweller brilliantly.
Aaron Moten plays Maximus of the Brotherhood of Steel and he’s probably the weakest of the three leads.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t put in a good shift, it’s just that he doesn’t have the same screen presence as the others. His character work is still quite solid and fun to watch.
Walton Goggins is arguably the star of the show as The Ghoul/Cooper Howard. Goggins has always been a talented actor, and his turn as the gunslinging bounty hunter is incredibly entertaining.
Positives
Adapting a well-established video game IP to the screen is a tough task because the studio needs to balance pleasing hardcore fans and drawing in new audiences.
This series strikes that balance adequately and rarely puts a foot wrong. It melds the lore of different games together to create quite a coherent story.
The story is structured well and all the arcs are more or less covered succinctly to provide a thrilling experience from start to finish.
Fallout has nailed the retrofuturistic aesthetic of the franchise and the costumes and effects are top-notch.
The script is also well-written, with many fun zingers and some exceptional delivery from the cast.
Negatives
Changing up certain aspects from the original lore always draws criticism regardless of how it translates, and the writers take that risk in this series.
There is also one particular case of CGI de-aging that is terrible compared to the rest of the series and that has to be called out.
Verdict
Fallout (2024) is a very fun series to watch regardless of whether audiences are familiar with the original lore or not. The way the series is crafted raises intrigue in the IP and might even draw more audiences into the game as a result.
The series has some hefty runtimes but getting through to the end is totally worth it in this writer’s opinion.
Fallout
Director: Jonathan Nolan, Daniel Gray Longino, Clare Kilner, Frederick E.O. Toye, Wayne Yip
Date Created: 2024-04-10 18:30
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