Amazon Sets the World On Fire With Its Great Gory Take on Fallout: Review

The Pitch: It’s two-hundred-some years after an alternate version of Earth has nuked itself to bits: most of the world is an irradiated wasteland filled with ghouls and monsters of varying stripes. The only real humans left out there are the Brotherhood of Steel — a techno-military cult dedicated to preserving the lingering artifacts of humanity — and the Vault Dwellers, sheltered goody-two-shoes types living out the centuries in hermetically-sealed Vaults until the day comes to repopulate the planet with their utopian community.

But when Vault 33 gets attacked by raiders, and the Vault’s Overseer Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) gets kidnapped, his daughter Lucy (Ella Purnell) ventures out into the wasteland to get him back, with nothing but her wits, her ideals, and her trusty Pip-Boy. Along the way, she’ll cross paths with a rogue soldier from the Brotherhood (Aaron Moten’s Maximus) and a Ghoul bounty hunter (Walton Goggins) with a pre-war past, as the three pursue a secret that could change the face of the new world forever.

Fall Out (The) Boys: Video game adaptations on TV used to be nothing but a losing proposition: now, in the age of HBO’s The Last of Us and (to a lesser extent) Paramount+’s Halo, the prospect isn’t quite so scary. Lucky thing, too, since Amazon MGM Studios seem to have taken the perfect tack for a series with a world as robust as Fallout’s: Keep loyal to the tone and iconography of the original games, give it a shiny big budget, and craft a story that uses its arch Nuclear Age imagery to ruminate on mankind’s unique ability to destroy itself.

To that end, it makes sense that this adaptation is executive produced by Westworld creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan. Like the prior show, this one also sinks humanity deep into a techno-apocalypse, with varying factions battling over whether mankind deserves to live with its terrifying mistakes. (We even get an unstoppable black-hat cowboy in Goggins’ Ghoul, whose acidic barbs purr with a pathos that grows clearer the more we get to know him.)

It’s Not Your Vault: In keeping with the games’ droll tone, though, Amazon smartly sharpens its The Boys-level knives, making for plenty of over-the-top gore and bleak jokes along the way. There are gags about bottle caps as currency, The Ghoul’s gun cutting delightfully enormous holes in its targets, and enough foot-related maimery to haunt Quentin Tarantino’s worst nightmares.

Purnell’s Lucy makes for a perfect straight woman for this cynical world she’s stepped into, an idealistic hall monitor who spends the season’s first half aghast that no one follows the Golden Rule anymore. (Her journey towards embracing that chaos and forging a new path for herself makes her more than a little compelling.)

Fallout (Prime Video)