‘Fallout’ Review: Amazon Video Game Adaptation From ‘Westworld’ Creators Is Heavy on Vibes, Light on Narrative Stakes

After a particularly harrowing setback to his mission in The Fallout, the new series from Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (Westworld), a bounty hunter known as The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) makes the executive decision to change course entirely. Although his less experienced traveling companion/prisoner protests, The Ghoul knows better. “The wasteland’s got its own golden rule,” he snarls. “Thou shalt get sidetracked by bullshit every time.”

That most of Prime Video’s Fallout consists of getting sidetracked by bullshit is simultaneously one of its main charms and one of its most frustrating flaws. At its liveliest, the sci-fi adventure captures the fun of simply getting to explore a strange new world, meeting colorful characters and going down mysterious rabbit holes. But the lack of urgency also means its eight hours take an awfully long time to get where it’s going.

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Though Fallout is based on the video game franchise of the same name, showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner have opted to construct a new tale with new characters set within the universe rather than adapt an existing arc — all the better to put longtime fans and total newbies (myself included) on slightly more even ground. Either way, our window into the scorched ruin formerly known as Los Angeles is Lucy (Ella Purnell), a plucky young woman who’s grown up in an underground bunker built to house human communities as they wait out a nuclear holocaust that destroyed civilization two centuries prior.

From the very first minutes of the Nolan-directed premiere, Fallout boasts a strong sense of place. Lucy’s vault is midcentury suburbia rendered in Space Age steel, dotted with incongruously chipper slogans (“Don’t lose your head!”) and populated by unsettlingly cheery citizens in matching jumpsuits. The surface world that Lucy finds herself in after a catastrophe is the polar opposite — a retrofuturistic Wild West mishmash caked in the kind of grime that’d be impossible to wash off even if there were enough water to go around.

But the biggest shock for Lucy is that the world’s hard-bitten survivors have no interest in her people’s lofty notions of re-civilizing the planet. “Vault’s nothing more than a hole in the ground for rich folks to hide in while the rest of the world burned,” scoffs shopkeeper Ma June (Dale Dickey, one of an impressive guest star bench that also includes Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Emerson and Matt Berry).

Fallout itself leans far more toward Ma June’s cynicism than Lucy’s idealism, serving up darkly funny fare with a giddy emphasis on the grotesque: It’ll never settle for a bloodless shootout when it can drop you in the middle of a melee where people are being drowned in pickle vats or ripped in half by sliding doors.

Our leads include The Ghoul, who is shown in flashbacks as a soft-spoken movie star named Cooper Howard but now presents as a scarred, noseless undead creature who’ll kill and then eat an old friend without a second thought. The obstacles the characters encounter include an enormous mutated axolotl whose rows of jagged teeth turn out to be, upon closer examination, writhing human fingers. It’s a sight to make the most hardened viewer groan in horror and delight.

While Fallout excels at capturing a vibe, it’s somewhat less successful at building stakes. The narrative eventually gestures toward the ugly and inhumane ideas that have created this ruined landscape: As one character somberly observes, “Everyone wants to save the world, they just disagree on how.” But the series’ biggest bombshells have only so much impact when they’re being dropped on characters written without much nuance (though the dual nature of The Ghoul does provide Goggins with ample opportunity to show off his range). The series struggles most with its third protagonist, a grunt-level soldier named Maximus (Aaron Moten) whose scant backstory and muddy motivations make him seem not so much mysterious as half-formed. While the plot essentially boils down to a three-way race between them to secure a certain mysterious MacGuffin, it appears at times that even the characters are in no rush to get there.

Perhaps they’re having too much fun simply taking in the wasteland, bounding about the desert in an Iron Man-esque suit of armor or poking into abandoned buildings to see what kind of creatures might come crawling out. In slower stretches, one might be reminded that Fallout exists in part to encourage viewers to explore this world further still, in the form of video games they might order on Amazon.

“There’s a lot of money in selling the end of the world,” a scientist (Sarita Choudhury) darkly notes, and she’s not wrong — heck, between HBO’s The Last of Us and Peacock’s Twisted Metal, “TV shows based on video games set in a post-apocalyptic universe” practically qualifies as its own sub-genre. But as long as the end times are this lovingly realized, it’s hard to mind. Much.