Amazon’s sci-fi highlight of the year is a masterpiece in which only one scene is annoying

Video game fans have learned to have mixed feelings about adaptations. Watching your favorite game as a series is a euphoric promise. But there are so many negative examples, so many failed implementations, that most sci-fi fans probably threw up their hands when the Fallout series was announced. Wrongly so, I am thankful to say. Fallout is an almost perfect masterpiece.

Sci-Fi highlight: That’s what Amazon’s Fallout series is about

The Fallout series does not adapt any specific story from the game franchise, which has existed since 1997. But fans will immediately feel at home in the story: It revolves around Lucy (Ella Purnell), who has lived in a gigantic fallout shelter since birth. The outside world is contaminated with radioactivity after a nuclear war. The Vault Dwellers, recognizable by their blue and yellow outfits and optimistic attitude, are preparing to repopulate the earth.

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But as a looter from the surface kidnap her father (Kyle MacLachlan), Lucy leaves the bunker. In the brutal world outside her home, she meets, among others, a quasi-undead bounty hunter (Walton Goggins) and a member of the warlike Brotherhood of Steel named Maximus (Aaron Moten).

The Fallout series is not a slave to its original and that is its greatest strength

The greatest strength of Amazon’s series is clear from the first minute. Fallout begins with a flashback to the nuclear war. Goggins’ character, lively, entertains children at a garden party with lasso tricks. We see the last minutes before the apocalypse. But that is not important.

What’s important is how much the series implicitly tells us in these minutes: Goggins’ Cooper Howard is a fallen Western star who uses tricks to stay afloat. Only his daughter stays with him. America responds to the nuclear threat by dancing on the volcano. The licked host whispers that Howard is probably a communist.

This is where the first and greatest strength of the series becomes apparent: She retains her freedom and creativity. While other series slavishly follow their templates and pile up fan service elements, series creator Jonathan Nolan (Westworld) concentrates on creating iconic characters, creating exciting scenes and telling a story that entertains, makes you tremble and laugh and brings sadness instead of containing as many Easter eggs as possible.

Walton Goggins’ lasso flies in slow motion. Panicked and disillusioned, a knight of the Brotherhood of Steel, wrapped in armor weighing tons, threatens to kill his squire. “Will you still want the same things when you [die atomare Wüste] changed completely?“, an escaped scientist asks the naive Lucy. Shortly afterwards he forces her to cutting off his head with a chainsaw. This series has a life of its own that makes you excited.

Fallout: The look of the sci-fi series is extremely detailed

The look of the Amazon series is not least responsible for this impression. The producers focused on practical sets and effects instead of CGI. They shot on grainy 35mm film, which gives the landscapes and faces something heavy and striking. And above all, they demonstrate an unrivaled attention to detail in their scenes.

Every scene, no matter how small, is crammed with objects. Garbage lying around, dust, discarded devices and machines, colorful cloths and greasy corrugated iron give the scene life. Gigantic ruins, car graveyards in the forest and shipwrecks in the desert give this apocalypse its dignity.

The Fallout stars impress as cowboys, warriors and naives

The creative freedom of the scripts and the richness of the aesthetics are matched by sensational casting. Walton Goggins in particular as Cooper Howard moves between the warm-hearted family man and the cruel bounty hunter with great ease and believability.

When Lucy cuts off his finger and he just replies dryly: “There you are, you little killer“, this shows us an iconic character: a character that transcends the video game franchise and the sci-fi genre. A brutalized, fallen idealist who has learned to expect violence in all forms. What a masterpiece. What an endlessly entertaining character!

Ella Purnell and Aaron Moten embody their leading roles similarly well. The one with the wide-eyed naivety that threatens to break the perfidious wasteland. The other as traumatized simpleton, whose ideal of absolute strength fails him from the first fork in the road.

The Fallout series has a single weak point

The whole thing would be a flawless masterpiece if the series didn’t run out of steam at the finish line. The plot threads are brought together too hectically, and the authors seem to be too proud of a mediocre and predictable resolution. Lucy’s minute-long disbelief, her father’s repetitive begging, a character’s sudden moral about-face, everything fits together a little too perfectly. It works artificial and lifeless, as if the makers didn’t have enough time in the end.

There have already been scenes before that have jeopardized the credibility of the series world for dramaturgical climaxes. For example, when mummified corpses provide clues to the circumstances of their deaths because they answer their most pressing questions painted on the walls with their own blood have. “We know the truth!“, “We know what’s in here!“Why is it always the concern of such dead people to inform posterity? It seems to me as if the screenwriters relied on wooden hammer images to save themselves the words.

But such scenes remain small details until the finale. Only in the last episode does the lack of dramatic energy become painful, because every fan expects a powerful reward for seven episodes of story development. Which then comes across as somewhat average with episode 8.

Judging by the fears of some fans, Fallout is still a win across the board. It can’t dislodge The Last of Us from the throne of video game adaptations, but Season 1 of the Amazon series will serve as a shining example of video game adaptations in the future. The end of the world couldn’t be more entertaining.