In the past films and television shows based on video games have been hit or miss. More recently they have been doing better with The Last Of Us. The Super Mario Brothers Movie and two Sonic the Hedgehog movies, with a third on the fay,  have done pretty well critically and financially. The latest video game to get adapted into a television/streaming series is Fallout from Prime Video. Fans of the game will be happy what they see here.

This series starts by splitting the story into three segments. The first segment is titled Lucy (Ella Purnell) because it’s focused on a young woman who lives in a vault numbered 33 with other inhabitants. She is eagerly awaiting her marriage to a man from the next vault over, 32. When things start to go haywire, as the inhabitants of vault 32 aren’t who they seem, or she and her family and friends she is forced to leave and go to the surface world to find her father who has been kidnapped.

The second segment focuses on a young guy named Maximus (Aaron Moten) who is a trainee for an elite group of armor-clad soldiers with monks as their leaders. He gets bullied by some of the other trainees, but when his friend who has been chosen to get a promotion gets injured he gets his opportunity to go with the men in armored suits. They are tasked with getting a bounty on a scientist and his dog. Things go as they are supposed to and Maximus ends up taking the mantle of the armored soldier.

The third segment focuses on a guy named The Ghoul (Walton Goggins, Justified) He is a character that had a past life in the 1960s where he was a successful actor with a wife and daughter. He had it all until the Cold War escalated into a nuclear holocaust. Fast forward to the future when this show takes place in the present time and he is a prisoner who is freed from his prison by three idiots who didn’t know what and who they released, a cold-hearted killing machine. He reminded me so much of some of Clint Eastwood’s classic Western characters from the past.

Eventually, the three stories would intersect and the series moves forward from there. As anybody who has played the video game probably knows, this show is set in a post-apocalyptic world. Once the series goes above ground away from the vault lifestyle you can tell the world is a bit damaged and mostly looks like a wasteland. There is a free-for-all type of atmosphere here and it’s basically a world where characters are just trying to survive. Death can come from anywhere and anyone.

As someone who hasn’t played the video game, I came into this completely new to this. I am pleasantly surprised how much I liked it. The production design is incredible in this series. I genuinely thought that this was a post-apocalyptic world. The vaults all looked great and everywhere that the three main characters went in the show looked authentic to the world that this series takes place in. 

There are a few other things that stood out for me in this show after watching all the episodes. The first is I loved the placement of various songs. There were classic song mixes that fit in nicely to a Western set show like this. The second is there is a lot of blood and gore in the series. The showrunners and directors don’t hold back on the gore whatsoever. Last but not least there is great makeup, especially on Walton Goggins’s character of The Ghoul. He looks like a very realistic take on the character from the game. That’s a good thing for those watching the series who aren’t that familiar with the game.

Walton Goggins is an actor I’m quite familiar with. I’m a big fan of his work on Justified as Dixie mafia leader Boyd Crowder. Since then he moved on to movies like the Tomb Raider reboot, another video game property, The Hateful Eight, and his foray into comedy with The Righteous Gemstones. Not since his role in Justified has he been perfectly cast in a role like The Ghoul. His Southern sensibilities lend themselves to this angry scarred Western man. His background the show sets up helps with the character’s development and I couldn’t imagine anybody else in this role except maybe a misfortunes Clint Eastwood, but those days are long gone. Goggins is so good as this character. I hope he gets some consideration for the Emmy Awards later this year.

Fallout is another win for Amazon and Prime Video as well as for video game series/films. It has the right feel and vibe as well as look. The post-apocalyptic setting is perfectly envisioned by the showrunners/directors Jonathan Nolan, and Clare Kilner, as well as the writers Chaz Hawkins, Graham Wagner and Genevieve Robertson-Dworet. The cast are all pretty good in their various roles, but Walton Goggins steals the show as The Ghoul. I can’t imagine anybody more suited for this character than him. He owns every scene he’s in from the beginning of the series to the end. Fans of the game should be proud of how this game was brought to life so well. This was a pleasant surprise to me who wasn’t familiar with the game beforehand. Another win for the video game genre.

All 8 Episodes of Fallout Have Been Review’d

4 stars

Dan Skip Allen