Amazon's end-time epic "Fallout" makes mistakes, but also shows courage

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Amazon's "Fallout" series is Hollywood's first attempt to bring the world of popular role-playing games to the big screen, true to Bethesda's video game template. On the whole, it succeeds pretty well - especially when you consider how bad almost all video game adaptations of the past have been, without exception. We already liked the first four episodes of the series and the second half follows on seamlessly from there. In the final meters, the whole thing becomes a bit philosophical in a surprisingly courageous way. But the series also has some tangible problems.

The following text reveals important story details about all eight episodes of Amazon's "Fallout" series.

Smouldering memories

The realization of "Fallout" for television suffers from two things in particular: Occasional plot weaknesses and a production that sometimes just doesn't feel plausible enough. The first point is not surprising in view of previous modern Hollywood series based on books, video games or old series. From "Star Trek" to "Star Wars", "Dungeons & Dragons" and "Marvel" to "Super Mario", scriptwriters in Hollywood have been making the same mistake for decades now: they sprinkle little nostalgia snippets for fans of the original material into their scripts (some fans call this "Member Berries" in reference to a legendary "South Park" episode) and promptly forget them again. Or create storylines that are completely implausible. This creates links to "the good old days" of the original, which then often come to nothing and confuse the plot of the new material.

A good example from "Fallout" is a scene after the raiders attack Lucy's Vault. A technician appears holding a prop that any hardcore "Fallout" fan will have recognized immediately: It's the Water Chip from the very first "Fallout" game. It was because of him that the whole adventure began! That's right. A nice allusion. The water chip is broken and we're all going to die of thirst - what was still a life-threatening situation and an integral part of the story in the very first "Fallout" game from 1997 is briefly interspersed here as an inside joke and then never taken up again. A missed opportunity of colossal proportions. Instead of telling a story here - telling little side stories is what the "Fallout" games did best - the idea is rather squandered for a cheap rush of nostalgia endorphins for the audience.

It's a shame that screenwriters, who already can't create anything of their own and have to make use of book, film and game templates from past decades, don't at least give this material the respect it deserves. They treat such moments as justification for their remakes and reboots instead of seizing the opportunity to try something new.

If you want to know how a television producer can take other people's material and create something wonderful new, you should watch the first seasons of Ronald D. Moore's "Battlestar Galactica" again. A different but equally successful approach can be seen in "Blade Runner" and Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" films, which show how a material beloved by fans can be lovingly re-presented without revolutionary changes. But well, to be honest, we weren't expecting anything as artistically valuable from "Fallout".

What do Namibia and a green screen have in common?

What bothered us even more about the Amazon adaptation of "Fallout" were the backdrops and the strange lack of supporting actors. The interplay of studio set-ups that look like theme park attractions, green screen environments and real, majestic landscapes, such as the former German ghost town of Kolmanskop in Namibia, sometimes has a disorienting effect on the viewer. It is difficult to believe that all the scenes are set in the same world because different locations sometimes appear completely different.

The setting in the scene in which Titus and Maximus encounter the Yao Guai almost seems like a parody, so obviously exaggeratedly painted nuclear waste barrel dummies have been transported into an obviously real cave. Every side-quest location in "Fallout 3", no matter how remote, still looks much more convincing today, despite the muddy-brown lo-fi textures. In the video game classics, despite many technical limitations, great importance was always attached to ensuring that all the details of a scene are coherent and create a stage set that tells a story or two even without characters. The Amazon series tries to do this once or twice, but always fails.

The places where the majority of the series takes place also seem strangely depopulated. At first, it seems nonsensical to say something like that about the world of "Fallout", in which the majority of the population was ultimately wiped out by a global nuclear war. But despite this, the games always shine with their strategically placed supporting characters. The clever arrangement of side characters, iconic enemies and the little stories that arise from their side quests makes the game world feel much, much bigger in all "Fallout" games. Amazon's "Fallout" series creates exactly the opposite impression. Somehow, you can't help but think that the places Lucy (Ella Purnell) passes through on her journey through the magical land of Oz were created especially for her. What's more, it almost feels as if no one else is there apart from Lucy, Maximus and the ghoul - as often as the central characters of the series run into each other.

At the end of the series, Lucy's father tops it all off by walking the almost 440 kilometers from Griffith Obervatory in LA to the Strip in Las Vegas from one scene to the next. Okay, he's wearing T-60 Power Armor, but in a "Fallout" game he would run out of power several times along the way. Not to mention the stress of dealing with Super Mutants and Deathclaws. And since he doesn't have a helmet on, the radiation would also be a problem. Even if you disregard all that, this scene again looks like an attempt to quickly name-drop "Fallout": New Vegas without anyone in the production team questioning whether it makes sense at this point in the story and perhaps doesn't test the already strained imagination of the casual viewer too much.

On the whole, the series strikes the right note

Incidentally, this does not apply to the scenes set in one of the Vaults. Here, the set designers have done a great job of getting the tone of the video games just right. And since the vaults are also completely exaggerated in the games, it doesn't matter that the producers have used their imagination to the full.

And despite the aforementioned shortcomings, the series was a lot of fun on the whole. For long stretches, it manages to do justice to the world from the video games. Mainly because it usually strikes the right thematic note. From the violent slapstick humor, which could have come straight out of a Tarantino film, to the music and the individual main characters, the series makers have done a lot right here.

Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins in particular carry the plot for long stretches with their acting performances. And since much of their dialog could just as easily come from a "Fallout" video game, and is even really funny in places, they make us look past the weaknesses in the set design and logic of some storylines.

A bold sideswipe

Where "Fallout" really shines, however, and sets itself apart from other uninspired adaptations of books or games, is the political component of the series. Admittedly, this is only a secondary aspect, but it captures the zeitgeist remarkably accurately. Someone really had a backbone here.

In the second half of the series, we see through the eyes of the ghoul (Walton Goggins) how the world-destroying thermonuclear war between the USA and China occurs in the year 2077 in the parallel world of "Fallout" (which, incidentally, only lasted just under two hours in the end). We witness a meeting in which Vault-Tec - the company that designed and built the fallout shelters from which the "Fallout" heroes traditionally emerge - consults with the largest defense and government corporations in the US about the future of the country and the world.

This is where the series introduces a storyline that has only been hinted at in the "Fallout" universe so far. Namely, that Vault-Tec and other powerful companies deliberately triggered the fatal nuclear war in order to profit afterwards from the reconstruction of a new, and in their opinion better, world. The idea: to bring about a hyper-capitalism by destroying all governments and the existing social order, which would dwarf even the already very pronounced turbo-capitalism in the parallel future of the "Fallout" universe.

And now we live in a time when the threat of nuclear war is more present than it has been for fifty years. So this nod to the "Fallout" fencepost comes just in time. We should do everything we can to ensure that we never actually stand on the terrace of our house drinking whisky and toasting the mushroom clouds in the distance while "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" by the Ink Spots plays from the stereo. However, if you want to pass the time until the perhaps inevitable end of the world with some black humor and a few eccentric, crazy characters, you could do worse than watch the new "Fallout" series. The eight episodes, available exclusively on Amazon Prime Video, will leave you wanting more.

(anw)