Séamas O'Reilly: Fallout is a videogame adaptation that leans into its ridiculousness

"...arguably the best compliment I can pay this adaptation is that it’s managed the same tightrope walk of tone and detail [as its inspiration] with aplomb..."

Walton Goggins as The Ghoul/Cooper Howard in Amazon's 'Fallout'.

Amazon’s Fallout begins with a blast, quite literally. 

Few shows would think to title their first episode ‘The End’ but it seems appropriate here, given that the climax of its introductory scene is a nuclear holocaust which just about destroys all human life on earth. 

Former cowboy actor Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) is performing rope tricks at a child’s birthday party in the far-flung future of 2077, but this date is never mentioned, and you might not guess it since the timeline of this universe has clearly taken a drastic detour from our own.

Although we see 21st-century skyscrapers and futuristic mod-cons, this world is all 1950s Americana, from the frilly swing dresses and pleated slacks that comprise the characters’ wardrobes, to the preponderance of cowboy movies and red scare panic on their CRT televisions.

We may be tempted to wonder whether America became suspended in an eternal ’50s, or else was delayed the advent of that era by 120 years, but such ruminations are beside the point. 

This is the ‘World of Tomorrow’ as imagined by the day-glo sci-fi of the atomic age, captured with all the detail, charm, and anachronistic details of those conceived within that very era. (Consider, for instance, that The Jetsons conjured a 2062 with flying cars and robot butlers, but stopped just short of imagining a financially independent woman.)

In any case, we don’t get much chance to tease any of this out because, well, Kaboom. Flashbacks aside, Fallout takes place 219 years later, whether above ground with the surface-dwellers, or in the vast, complex fallout bunkers which give the series its name.

Below ground, we find people who have thrived in shelters made by Vault-Tec, the private corporation who foresaw the blasts and now houses thousands of humans in vaults around America. 

We begin in Vault 32, where idealistic vaulter Lucy (played with wide-eyed elan by the excellent Ella Purnell) lives with her father Hank (Kyle McLachlan) and a small, but amiable, community beneath Santa Monica pier. 

Here, those ’50s values have been retained and promulgated for two centuries, as citizens in matching blue jumpsuits interact with small-town jocularity, and strive to be good, caring neighbours.

Above ground, however, life is a little more dog-eat-dog. Here we find Maximus, who jostles for respect and attention within The Brotherhood, a militaristic cult who balance quasi-Catholic monastic titles and religious rites with their penchant for hyperviolent mech warfare. 

And deeper into the wasteland we meet an undead bounty hunter named The Ghoul who, it’s immediately revealed, is none other than Cooper Howard himself, mutated by two centuries’ exposure to radiation into an immortal abomination who now makes his living as a gunslinger.

If this all sounds like heady stuff, well it is, but it’s also not. Fallout is taken from a very popular series of video games, which married its large world action-adventure gameplay with a darkly comic edge, and arguably the best compliment I can pay this adaptation is that it’s managed the same tightrope walk of tone and detail with aplomb.

Fallout is simply very, very good at what it does. If, after greatly enjoying HBO’s The Last Of Us, I’m surprised to find myself loving a second apocalyptic video game adaptation within a single calendar year, I’m even more surprised it’s the second alternate-timeline Cold War parable, after Apple’s For All Mankind. 

But it truly beggars belief that this is the second twisty sci-fi set in a series of nested fallout bunkers, after last year’s Silo. Crucially, where I deeply enjoyed all three of the above, none could creditably be described as a laugh riot, whereas Fallout leans into its own ridiculousness with brio.

It’s not just a useful tonic for the show’s more egregious, and delightful, turns into hyperviolence, it also staves off the flood of follow-on questions that comes from any high-concept fare that takes itself more seriously. 

Just how irradiated is this wasteland, exactly? How did said fallout lead to giant, malformed axolotls with thousands of human fingers for tongues? Where does the infrastructure come from for the high-tech stuff they have? Are there people out there manufacturing new weapons and robots or is it all remarkably well-preserved salvage from 200 years ago? Shhhh. Relax. No such quibbles matter when you’re having as much fun as Fallout does.

Much of this fun is down to a canny script and performances that steer into humour where others might pull away. Nowhere is this more apparent than in vaulter Lucy. 

Ella Purnell’s take on the character straddles the line of this role beautifully, filled with aw-shucks innocence and a moral rectitude that charms rather than grates. 

Like Brendan Fraser’s character in Blast From The Past, she must navigate a hard-scrabble terrain vastly removed from her own ’50s-inflected worldview. 

There she finds a world of humans who have evolved past any she’s met before, a bit like Brendan Fraser’s character from California Man, forced to blend in as a fish-out-of-water, like that guy who played George of the Jungle, whose name I forget.

The other standout is Walton Goggins’ star-affirming turn as both the sardonic, indefatigable Ghoul and, in parallel flashbacks, a pre-blast Cooper Howard, a decent man increasingly at odds with the creeping nuclear dread he sees around him. 

Like anyone who came to love him through his work in Justified, my attitude to Walton Goggins is basically “yes” and he once again brings more pathos to both parts of his role than you could ever realistically expect — not least for a character who spends 80% of the show as a gun-toting reanimated corpse with no nose.

That is, in essence, the joy of Fallout. It’s so much better than it has any right to be. In the current glut of adapted IP, and soulless retreads through tired formats, we should treasure good, pulpy thrills which are delivered this well. 

You’d have every reason to think Fallout would be a bomb, but it’s anything but.