“War. War never changes.” It’s a grim warning, which leads the introductory monologue to every mainline game in the Fallout franchise. It’s a real mood-setter, usually accompanied by a summary of the state of society: In an alternate future, the world is living in retro-futurist, atompunk bliss. That is, until the bombs drop. And so, 200 years after the end of everything, the story begins.
The first Fallout game launched for home computers in 1997, introducing players to a nuclear hellscape where they take on the role of a Vault Dweller — people who, fortunately or not, have survived generations underground. The game presents a world filled with irradiated monsters, mutated ghouls, and warring factions driven by political or religious zealotry. It’s grown with the times — 2008’s Fallout 3 morphed the series from a point-and-click RPG to an open-world journey, and now, it’s about to change again, with a Prime Video adaptation from the creators of HBO’s Westworld, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy.
Nolan, who co-wrote 2008’s The Dark Knight with his brother Christopher Nolan, helped kick off the “latter-day comic book golden age on film,” as he describes it. It was around then he first discovered the cinematic potential for video games, particularly Fallout 3. “I played more of that game than I care to admit,” Nolan says. “If The Dark Knight Rises took an extra year, it may have had to do with Fallout 3.”
Alongside showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner (Silicon Valley), Nolan sought to overcome major challenges, namely balancing the game’s elegiac tone without losing its quirky spirit and, especially, consolidating a player’s choice-driven experience into something linear.
“You have some storylines, but the world is the opposite of on-rails,” he says. “And bringing that scope to the audience? [That kind of] freedom’s impossible. There’s nothing more on-rails than prestige television.”
That lack of freedom also applies to who the show is about. How do you tell the story of Fallout when it’s no longer your story? He muses, “If you think about the first twenty minutes of playing Fallout – the latter-day games, Fallout 4 or Fallout 76 – you spend the first forty minutes designing your character. [There’s] no analog for that in television. When we cast someone, you don’t get any say in who that person is or how you relate to them.”
The solution is what Nolan calls the “classic HBO mold of an omnibus ensemble,” following three characters. The story begins with a Vault Dweller named Lucy (Yellowjackets‘ Ella Purnell), who, forced to leave a cushy subterranean life, will cross paths with Brotherhood of Steel initiate Maximus (Aaron Moten), whom Nolan describes as a squire in the “quasi-militaristic, quasi-religious organization dedicated to limiting the spread of technology.” Rounding out the trio is the Ghoul, a near-immortal, disfigured gunslinger, played by Walton Goggins. His journey will take viewers through multiple eras, from the pre-nuclear apocalypse to the series’ present, charting his path from a normal life in 2077 to becoming an irradiated Man in Black two centuries later. The show will hinge on the juxtaposition of these characters’ worldviews. “We have a knight in shining armor, a zombie cowboy, and a quirky suburbanite,” says Wagner. “[They] don’t have much of a shared sense of history, or even a shared sense of reality.”
That lack of shared reality sadly parallels much of the cultural division in our own world, and will boil up through Lucy’s experience. “[There’s] so much resonance to this story of this privileged young lady who comes from a luxury fallout shelter and has spent her entire life — and the lives of the previous nine generations — with this almost messianic fervor about returning to the earth and rebuilding America,” says Nolan. “And this total ignorance to all the people they left behind and left to rot up above. It’s pretty great material for satire.”
Beginning development over five years ago in our own before times, the irony of the escalating relevance of the source material isn’t lost on the creators, with Nolan saying, “It’s sort of mid-pandemic, then you get to a resurgence. There’s another land war in Europe, and you’re like, ‘OK, we don’t need anymore, we’re relevant enough, hold off on the relevance!’ As with so many people, we’ve been sitting here looking at the world in just fucking despair, frankly.”
But like the games, the show doesn’t aim to depress. In a gonzo world of giant scorpions and Forbidden Planet-style robots, it’s the human element that should shine through. Specifically, from those that seem least human of all: ghouls. “They’re almost poignantly humanized. We’ve seen a lot of zombie shows and a lot of zombie movies. You haven’t seen a lot where there’s a zombie named ‘Fred’ who likes mac and cheese and misses his mom,” Nolan explains.
With a character-driven approach and an extreme reverence for the source material, there’s a lot to be hopeful about for Fallout, even as it presents a world that itself appears hopeless. As we all know, war never changes. But sometimes people do.
Fallout premieres April 12 on Prime Video.
Michaela Coel in ‘The Christophers.’Claudette Barius/NEON
