Built on a wearying cheerful optimism/cruel fatalism dichotomy—contrasting chords that aren’t all that engaging or novel to begin with but repeated ad nauseum regardless—it’s astonishing just how quickly the post-apocalyptic sci-fi series, “Fallout,” wears out its welcome. Startlingly glib, one-note, and yet self-assured in its vacant design, the series reveals its shallow hand very early. “Fallout” endlessly reprises the wholesome quaintness vs. the grotesque or freakishly ruthlessness mode of apposition and fails to do anything remotely interesting with it, reinforcing what swiftly becomes a long, tiresome pattern and slog. While “Fallout” vaguely resembles the work of Paul Verhoeven in tone, it’s just goofier in the end and absolutely not as clever, nimble, or subversively as his classic 1980s sci-fi movies it hopes to emulate.
Based on the popular Bethesda Softworks-owned role-playing video game franchise, “Fallout,” the game’s milieu was one of atompunk retrofuturism, juxtaposing 1950s post-war idealism—the naïve promise of space-age technology and nuclear war anxieties— against the framework of a ravaged and dangerous apocalypse. While “Fallout,” the series, presents the concepts and throwback aesthetics faithfully, that’s unfortunately all it’s got in its trivial toolkit. What it does with it beyond that devoted presentation is just banal, insipidly trying to make a big meal out of a thin idea that is barely sustainable nourishment. Essentially, “Fallout” is a series constructed around—and more interested in—worldbuilding, and it’s one that lays out its hostile post-apocalyptic world quickly and adds nothing substantive to it other than monotonous plot mysteries.
Set in an alternate history of Earth, where advances in nuclear technology after WWII led to the emergence of a retro-futuristic society— though it’s really all just a weirdly boring aesthetic fetish for the 1950s— “Fallout” begins at a birthday party in sunny California. Set against the backdrop of nuclear apprehensions— parents turning off the vintage-fashioned TV sets that warn of impending atomic calamity—a lassoing cowboy father (Walton Goggins), ridiculed by his parental peers, is the afternoon’s entertainment, his horse and young cowgirl daughter as performance accessories. And no sooner than they take a break for cake, a nuclear war breaks out, eradicating the nearby metropolises with blinding white lights, families running futilely for nearby fallout shelters.
Quickly fast-forwarding 219 years, the year in now, 2296 in Los Angeles, and a nuclear apocalypse has decimated the planet. The new world represented is that of the Vault, an underground civilization of fallout bunkers where some lucky members of society have hidden to preserve humanity (“To keep the candle of civilization lit while the rest of the world has been cast into darkness,” one character declares). Having never ventured outside to the above-ground Earth they assume radiation has poisoned beyond habitation, the gentle, naïve, and self-sustainable denizens of Vault 33 are preparing for a wedding. Proud father and Vault Overseer Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) is about to send off his daughter (“Yellowjacket” star Ella Purnell) to an arraigned marriage with a neighboring Vault culture they have never met as is the custom of the times. Meant to be a prosperous union for both societies, the jejune, gullible Vault dwellers soon realize they’ve been tricked—posing as the adjacent Vault are bands of savage raiders from the surface here to rape, pillage, and plunder their resources.
“Fallout” then turns on what’s meant to be its secret weapon of genre charms—the first of many slow-motion montages of violence set to contravening wannabe enchanting, old-fashioned 1950s music, Perry Como, The Ink Spots, Bing Crosby, Betty Hutton, Roy Rodgers, etc.—as if this would-be eccentric juxtaposition is inherently funny, outlandish, and wild. It’s not; it’s a contrived dud of a trivial move, and, moreover, the show goes to this well far too often, just emphasizing how hollow it all is. And that’s “Fallout” in a nutshell in every form: the shiny, happy people’s innocence and ingenuousness of its ‘50s-esque Vault dwellers, with their bright and jolly-looking blue and yellow uniformity costumes, distinguished against the cruel and mercilessness of everyone else living the harsh realities of the post-apocalypse (when it’s not slathered in the honeyed mellifluousness of the old-timey Andrew Sisters, a cow-pokey Johnny Cash rockabilly number over scenes of viciousness will do).
In the aftermath of the bloody, violent skirmish, Lucy’s innocent father is kidnapped by the marauders, and against all warnings, she heads to the surface to find and rescue him. Painfully credulous and ill-equipped to survive the cold-bloodedness of the hellscape wasteland above—meant to be the entire har har comedy of it all yet not at all amusing—her storyline eventually conjoins with two others. One is the feeble, insecure, nervously sweaty Maximus (Aaron Moten), a wimpy solider-in-training squire of the Brotherhood of Steel— a quasi-religious technocratic military order created by the military in the aftermath of the Great War, i.e., they wear the clunky steampunky armor suit the game is known for. The other is The Ghoul, a murderously self-interested and mutated gunslinger turned bounty hunter, aka Walton Goggins, the cowboy from the prologue, still alive hundreds of years later (Moisés Aria, Zach Cherry, Johnny Pemberton, and Leslie Uggams are among the supporting cast)
Their storylines converge, merge—Michael Emerson as the scientist Wilzig is in the middle of it briefly— and eventually point towards an unholy union that potentially could find Hank. But even by the time they might, “Fallout” has already announced itself as a non-starter and bore (its lame shortcuts of splatter and f-bombs to create disarming laughs are dreadfully tedious, too).
Meant to be darkly humorous, vulgar bursts of violence as its stock and trade, “Fallout” isn’t even distantly humorous. Moreover, the show is overly self-confident about how gleefully weird it all is when it’s just trite and just feels like a rehash of post-apocalyptic tropes we’ve already seen rendered more intriguingly a dozen times before. The core blissful/brutal tonal contrast at its center soon becomes cloyingly pollyannaish, exasperating, never as clever, amusing, or witty as it thinks it is. This lack of self-awareness makes “Fallout” even more painful as it clumsily plods along with a lifeless one-note/one-joke that never thrills or excites (in a sign of monotonous filler, the show even has the gall to flashback to the Ghoul’s past as an actor even though it elucidates next to nothing). Already slight, the built-in commercial breaks for Amazon Prime Video Ads—very offputting in nature— seemingly every two minutes, don’t help the experience, giving the entire affair an air of episodic disposability.
Directed by Jonathan Nolan, an executive-producer alongside “Westworld” co-creator Lisa Joy, this filmmaker does the series no favors and creatively adds nothing beyond doubling down on the “aw shucks” “Leave It To Beaver” guilelessness contrasted with the dank gore, dusty Western cliches, and montage-heavy violence. Again, all of it incessantly soundtracked to easy-listening, elevator music-style vocal pop, boogie-woogie novelty hits, or jazzy do-wop to the point every music cue is a queasily self-satisfied aggravation. While the show clearly has a budget with its practical sets and VFX, that is not a captivating series if of itself, and none of the writing fails to raise each character beyond their one-dimension (ingenuous, cruel, or riddled with self-doubt for the three leads).
Unremarkably created by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner (writer/producers on films like “Captain Marvel” and shows like “The Office” and “Silicon Valley”), the one point of texture the show attempts to explore is the notion of have and have-nots: Vault dwellers are revealed to be the rich and privileged of yesteryear’s humanity, and everyone else scrounged around for what was left. But given the Vault Dwellers are ultimately the ones you’re meant to empathize with, all of it is superficially rendered.
“Fallout” amounts to its Vault Boy concept art—the Monopoly-aesthetic-looking smiley thumbs-up character the game is famous for— with blood splattered on top of the colorful image as if that ironic disparity is meant to be enough. It’s not. “Fallout” may look the part and nail the video game’s cheery optimism/dog-eat-dog inhumanity mein, but by its umpteenth attempt at making this funny—Glen Miller big band cliches overtop of a transmogrified giant fish trying to eat a young squire!—you want this one trick mutated pony to die a quick and painful death already. [D+]
“Fallout” premieres early today, April 10, on Prime Video.