Amazon Prime Video has just released a brand new trailer for Fallout, its upcoming post-apocalyptic science fiction series based on the beloved video game franchise from Interplay Entertainment and Bethesda Softworks. The Fallout games are known for their tongue-in-cheek humor, their whacky approach to the apocalypse, and their subtle social commentary as characters fight their way across a Wasteland where tribalism runs rampant. Amazon's series looks primed to capture all those key ingredients and more. Watch the trailer below:
There's a lot to pick over from the Fallout trailer, but what stood out the most to me is how much of an effort was made to capture the spirit of the games. From the classic Fallout soundtrack song "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" by the Ink Spots to the imposing power armor of the Brotherhood of Steel to the tonal shifts as the naïve vaultdweller Lucy (Ella Purnell) gets her hands bloody to survive the Waste, this feels like Fallout. It even sounds like they got John Cleese to reprise his role from Fallout 4, where he voices a Mister Handy robot named Codsworth. The Mister Handy in this trailer looks a fair bit more threatening though, as he cheerfully informs Lucy that he's "just going to harvest organs."
Fallout is being produced by Jonathan Nolan, one of the co-creators of HBO's Westworld, who also directed three episodes of the new Prime Video series. Nolan is a longtime fan of the games and has had his eye on adapting them for quite a while. "I think it started, for me, with Fallout 3, which devoured about a year of my life," Nolan recalled at a virtual trailer launch event attended by Winter Is Coming. "I was an aspiring young writer at that point. It almost derailed my entire career. It's so ludicrously playable and fun. No, I mean, seriously, the games were just incredible."
Nolan explained how he and Bethesda Softworks executive director Todd Howard went out to lunch years ago, which ended up being a "fanning-out moment" for Nolan where they "just started talking about the possibilities of how you could take this incredible universe" to television. That lunch resulted in a "hand-shake deal" between the two that they would one day try to adapt Fallout. Next month, we'll get to see the fruits of their labor.
The Fallout show is set up as a continuation of the game franchise, rather than a direct adaptation of any singular game. This is in keeping with the tone of the Fallout series, which features new characters and settings in each new installment.
"It's set in the world of Fallout, but it's a new story that comes, sort of, after the events we've seen. So it really is, the show is built on like 25 years of creativity and thinking and building," explained Fallout show co-creator Graham Wagner. "And we sort of thought the best thing to do is continue that, versus retread it. Because that's sort of what has worked with Fallout over the years. It's traded hands, it's changed, it's been altered, and it's a living thing. And yeah, we kind of felt like we ought to take a swing at trying to build a new piece."
There are three characters at the center of Fallout: Lucy (Purnell), a privileged young woman who grew up in an underground vault and is now setting out into the Waste to help kickstart society; Maximus (Aaron Moten), a squire in the militant Brotherhood of Steel; and the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), an outlaw roaming the Wastes whose body has been mutated by the surface's radiation.
This trailer gives us betters looks at all three of them, but especially the Ghoul. It appears he may have been alive back before the nuclear apocalypse, serving as a salesman for Vault Tec's vaults. Just speculating here, but in Fallout 4 we're introduced to a character who was also a vault salesman, who was then barred from entering the vault and ended up turning into a ghoul who survived through hundreds of years until the events of the game. Something tells me the Fallout television series may take a similar tack with Goggins' character, which would be a great way to explore the show's ideas about have and have-nots, and how priveledge manifests during the apocalypse.
Fallout will release all eight episodes at once on April 11 on Prime Video. Set your calendar and start getting your vault suit ready now, because it's going to be a binge watch.
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