Fallout on Prime Is the Video Game Adaptation You Need to be Watching

(SPOT.ph) The crescendo of the video game series adaptation is upon us. After a great year of “based on the popular video game” titles in 2023 featuring the unprecedented success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and the awards sweep of Prestige Drama™ series The Last of Us, one need not be superstitious to sense a video game adaptation boom over the horizon—much like how the two-hit combo of The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises kicked off the superhero/comic book movie competition of the 2010’s.

There is no better manifestation of this video adaptation boom than—quite literally—the nuclear explosion that kicks off Prime Video’s new streaming series Fallout, based off the Bethesda gaming series of the same name. The retro sci-fi RPG Fallout has been one of the more long-standing decades-old video game franchises, perhaps due to its distinct blend of atompunk pop aesthetic and post-apocalyptic wasteland setting. 

Now, after four mainline games and a half-dozen other spin-offs, Fallout graces home screens for audiences, instead of players taking on a blank slate character to explore the remnants of civilization… and it surprisingly delivers on all its genre pastiche. 

Also read: 10 Upcoming Video Game Adaptations That Might Actually Be Good

SPOT.ph’s Review of Fallout on Prime Video: 

Fallout takes place over 200 years into the fallout—cue Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme—of a nuclear war that destroyed practically all civilization in the mid-1950’s. Taking cues from Game of Thrones and a plethora of other fantasy ensemble shows, the series kicks off by jumping around various character perspectives from vastly different regions of the fictional land. 

Here, you get a quick rundown of the different factions of this setting; the Vault Dwellers made up of the descendants of the rich and powerful who were wealthy enough to own blast shelters when the bombs went off, the cult-like Brotherhood of Steel who act as the policing force of the wasteland, and the lawless bounty hunters. Then, as soon as you start to settle into the groove and rhythm of what seems to be these characters’ individual storylines, the series criss-crosses and smashes them together to seemingly test what it makes of them.

Carrying the ensemble are leads Ella Purnell (Arcane), who delivers an understated yet hilarious performance as a naively optimistic Vault Dweller named Lucy who ventures out into the wasteland for the first time, and Walton Goggins (Ant-Man and the Wasp), who pretty much just plays your typical Walton Goggins anti-hero types but, boy, does he make the segments inspired by Western shootouts and standoffs sing. It would not be surprising in the least if they revealed at any point that the filmmakers built the series around Goggins’ performance in The Hateful Eight since that irreverent humor seems to be the overall tone they’re going for with the series.

The tone might be the most surprising for most audiences who aren’t familiar with the series, as both the video game and the streaming series seem to relish in the deadpan and zany humor, rather than going for a more bleak dystopian mood a la The Walking Dead or epic sci-fi drama like The Mandalorian. The first two episodes both already feature pretty gruesome story developments that would probably be handled with more dramatic weight in any other serialized program, but in Fallout, these scenes are played in such a nonchalant way, it’s as if despair and tragedy are everyday occurrences in their society.

Those willing to stick it out despite the unusual tone are definitely in for a new world of a series where the unexpected can happen. If nothing else, you get the “Goodest Boy,” i.e. the best main dog character on a series in a while in the form of the German Shepherd CX404. 

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 Spots

The first season of Fallout is now streaming on Prime Video.