MIDNIGHT REVIEWS Fallout S1 E1 Review
Midnight Reviews features reviews and thought pieces written and edited by a parent, at night, after bedtime.
Fallout Season 1 Episode 1: ‘The End’
Series created by: Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Graham Wagner
Featuring: Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Walton Goggins
Synopsis: Nuclear apocalypse has left the Earth, or at least the United States, very different to what it used to be. Lucy MacLean (Purnell) is a vault-dweller, relatively safe underground but her society needs to open its doors to outsiders. Maximus (Moten) was saved by The Brotherhood of Steel when he was a young boy; now he wants to move up the ranks. Finally, Cooper (Goggins) was a cowboy-themed entertainer when the bombs dropped. Somehow, over a century later, he’s still alive but changed forever by radiation. He is now The Ghoul.
Review: Not enough has been made of the fact that TV, or at least streaming, is going the way of movies and is under the threat of becoming too bloated. I mean, look at the synopsis for this episode. The End is longer than some movies at seventy-five minutes, and the later episodes aren’t far off. Reviewing this when the little one is asleep is going to be no mean feat (I don’t have a place where you can send me money. Instead, simply record yourself playing the violin and send me the YouTube link (extra points for playing it poorly)).
Still, Fallout’s opening salvo is by no means overstuffed and moves at quite a clip in order to fit in all the setups. We have Lucy, who as anyone that’s played any of the games will know, is destined to leave the vault so that Things Can Happen. Hopefully we get some glimpses of what happens in these vaults after things go wrong; this to me is equally as interesting as any number of post-apocalyptic landscapes. Purnell plays Lucy as halfway between the harsh, cynical nature of the outside raiders and the naivety of the vault dwellers. Curious, but kind.
They have nailed the look of the games.
It’s inside the vault that viewers will be most convinced that this is a true Fallout adaptation, despite the debate over whether even the later games are true adaptations. They have nailed the look of the games, but haven’t gone over the top with the aspects of the game pulled from the 1950s (we do still have some old-style tunes mixed in with Ramin Djawadi’s more typical score). These scenes present an America intent on still being the best whilst simultaneously reduced to trading ‘seed’ and ‘breeders’.
It’s a little unclear how large the vault they live in actually is. Sometimes the impression is that the area they live in is quite small (they use a projector to display a field onto a wall to give the illusion of space), while at other times there’s the sense that this place is larger than a skyscraper.
Fortunately little moments prove there isn’t a lack of humour, what with Norm MacLean (Moises Arias) using his Pip-Boy the same way some of us use our phones today. There is also a lot of matching up song lyrics to what is happening onscreen, a technique perhaps used to suggest the idealism that life in the vault should be. That is until a character wipes his penis on the curtain whilst someone sings about two souls falling in love gives us a tell-tale sign that things are not quite right.
There are also lots of references! There’s Grognak, there are sugar bombs, there is even talk of speech skills. Hopefully the series isn’t jam-packed with moments that amount to nothing more than a recognition/memory game.
We are later introduced to Maximus, a member of The Brotherhood. Thankfully, we are not presented with an overbearing, macho presence but instead given time with a wet blanket. Maximus is not a typical Brotherhood candidate, destined to shovel shit all day and tired of it already. The organisation he lives within gives off a quasi-religious feudalism. What does this Brotherhood represent? Are they America’s unwillingness to change? Are they a representation of the military-industrial complex the next step along, where might is not just right, but Godly?
It’s here where Maximus shows his sneakiness by giving the impression of being a zealot, and Moten does really well to suggest he is capable of committing terrible yet simple acts if it means he gets to move on up.
Moten is given time to put Maximus’ secretive façade on display before allowing us a glimpse of the glowering jealousy in moments of quiet. It’s unfortunate that it’s with The Brotherhood that the show threatens to get a little silly, with robed elders talking about The Enclave in a way that doesn’t quite translate from a video game. This is counter balanced by the imposing presentation of the so-called knights, who look like they’d rip someone’s head off with as much thought and effort as it takes me to tidy my child’s toys away.
I was left wanting more, and wanting to know more.
It’s Goggins who’s received most press, it seems. If he fulfils the promise of this first episode and is given the right material, this’ll be his show. He is given a charismatic role to play and, despite the muffled dialogue, seems a mixture of charming and unrestrained that promises to deliver helter skelter moments that play well in trailers. The question is: Is Fallout going to be a focus on character, or rather a focus on evocative imagery and one-off moments? The former is the basis of every good story; the latter makes great advertising but doesn’t deliver anything emotionally.
The evocative imagery does work as a way to build what the show is trying to say, along with its own tone of voice. The cowboy riding away from a nuclear explosion clearly echoes America trying to deal with its sense of self, its roots in such ideals as freedom and idealism, in a world far too complex for these ideals to be clear-cut or easy.
The sense of adventure and discombobulation a player can feel, creating that overall excitement, isn’t there just yet but the dark sense of humour is. It builds up to a delicious moment around the halfway mark where the vault’s projector, now broken, displays a burnt mark on the screen, deliberately echoing the nuclear explosions from hundreds of years prior. Fallout seems to be suggesting that all the events of the show are happening in this time between humanity shooting itself in the face, and getting back up again. A ‘PLEASE STAND BY’ for civilisation. But it will need more than these images to sustain itself.
So far the telltale signs of a Jonathan Nolan/Lisa Joy show have been limited to starting at The End, which is clever in a Banksy sort of way, and having Ramin Djawadi on the soundtrack. Despite the time jumps, Fallout doesn’t seem too obtuse. I was left wanting more, and wanting to know more. Hopefully the rest of the series lives up to the promise.
Matthew D. Smith likes to overshare his views on movies whenever and wherever he can. Indulge him, and follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Smith_M_D
