The result of the transposition of the post-apocalyptic video game produced by Jonathan Nolan with its picturesque retro-futuristic aesthetic is decidedly unexpected (in a good way)
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| Image Credit: Amazon Prime |
The writer thought - thanks to a deplorable arrogance fueled by cinematic and television bulimia and the stubborn refusal to view the trailer before the screeners - that he knew what to expect from the post-apocalyptic series Fallout. It's always a mistake to delude yourself into thinking you've seen them all, especially for those who grew up on science fiction and bread, and the adaptation from 11 April on Prime Video inspired by the video games of the same name crumbles every certainty, leaving people astonished (F4), surprised (positively) and astonished (almost).
The creator of this provocative, extravagant, and hilarious transposition is Jonathan Nolan of Westworld and Person of Interest. Together with his wife Lisa Joy (is she responsible for the bizarre, picturesque, and grotesque side of the series? Her past in Pushing Daisies suggests so) Nolan, a great admirer of video games launched by the motto War Never Changes! creates a transposition - or rather, a story set in the same universe - incredibly fresh, new, original, and surprising. Half an episode is enough for Nolan & Joy to asphalt the acclaimed The Last of Us and snatch the crown (in/rightly?) of best adaptation from a video game.
The Prime Video series, with the desolate landscapes of the Mad Max-style surface that clash in unsettling contrast with the retrofuturistic look of the underground Vaults (fallout shelters), Nolan's irresistible taste for science fiction-western, the irreverent satirical register that colors of black humor, a social commentary of chilling crudeness, is an electrifying new viewing experience, perfectly usable for those unfamiliar with the dystopian and post-atomic world populated by ghouls and super mutants of the atompunk role-playing video game created by Interplay Entertainment in the late 90s. The protagonist, new to the franchise (the show does not use the characters from the video game, apart from the indispensable Dogmeat), of this imaginative Madmaxian road movie that talks about colliding realities is Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell of Yellowjackets), a young and optimistic privileged woman who has grown up in the idyllic and protected society of Vault 33.
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| Image Credit: Amazon Prime |
Lucy abandons her community of Wellsian Eloi to venture onto the surface devastated by radiation and populated by wild, violent, and sometimes monstrous survivors (the Morlocks of the case) to search for her father, kidnapped by a venerated leader named Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury of Mississippi Masala ). In her odyssey, she comes across numerous figures that dot a varied array of strange types. His co-protagonist, Aaron Moten's amorphous Maximus (why didn't Nolan choose his friend, Dane, a much more interesting character played by Xelia Mendes-Jones, as Lucy's sidekick? Someone explains it to us) is an aspiring Knight, who is, a soldier of the disturbing Brotherhood of Steel (neo-Templar fanatics) who aspires to obtain one of the powerful exoskeletons dispensed by the Order to a select few. If we exclude the bland Lucy and Max - the only slightly more charismatic and less sulky equivalents of Rei and Finn from Star Wars - the myriad of other characters in this colorful ensemble cast are all intriguing, stimulating, and enjoyable.
Rising above all others is Cooper Howard (played by the great Walton Goggins of Justified), a bicentenary former Hollywood western actor, bounty hunter, and cynical Ghoul, careerist, perversely fascinating, and instrumental in reconstructing the disturbing background that led to nuclear war. Briefly but memorably appearing in two key roles are Michael Emerson in an altruistic version of Lost's Benjamin Linus and Kyle MacLachlan as Lucy's mastiff parent (affectionate with his daughter but who kills everyone else). A handful of comedians – Matt Berry of What We Do in the Shadows, Chris Parnell, and Fred Armisen of Saturday Night Live – carve out comic parts thanks to crazy characters (Berry has a double role, if you listen to the original you will also hear him lend his voice to a robot) which enrich an already sensationally farcical show.
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| Image Credit: Amazon Prime |
Fallout effectively integrates the madness of its source with that of Nolan & Joy, who worked with smug confidence, palpable audacity, and widespread hedonism to integrate their story, their characters, and their style into the universe of videogame IP by creating a product innovative, bold and with an imperceptible Mars Attacks! vibe. The couple clearly has a lot of fun offering the viewer ultra-violent and bloody sequences accompanied with blatant provocative taste by a soundtrack composed of catchy and lively musical classics from the 1930s to the 1960s such as What a Difference A Day Made, It's Just a Matter of Time, I'm Tickled Pink, I Don't Want to See Tomorrow and We Three (My Echo, My Shadow and Me). The 1950s aesthetic of the flashbacks and the vintage (and somewhat Loki-like) aesthetic with which the Vaults are represented in the present are part of the admirable scenography of Fallout, impressive even when reconstructed on location, on the real sets in Namibia and in the mountains of Utah, the lunar and desert landscape of the surface.
The overcrowded story of Fallout branches out in a thousand directions without the authors losing sight, if not rarely, of the darkly comic tones of the grotesque. The rich (and slightly dispersive) narrative never diminishes the seriousness of the themes it deals with, always investigating the ethical dilemmas of the plot and the moral ambiguity of its antagonists, always dwelling with pleasure on the elements of horror and gore. This extraordinary production, full of hilariously comic moments interwoven with serious reflections, decidedly changes tone in the final episode, concluding with some dizzying narrative turns that lead to very dark revelations, and demonstrating that Fallout is, indeed, the result of a brilliant cocktail.