Fallout: Season Two marches on to New Vegas and continues its barnstorming march across a post-apocalyptic America.
I came to this Fallout series with fresh eyes. The wrong generation to be a computer-gamer as I am a late-period Boomer. My adult sons and their mates are keen video gamers. World of Warcraft was massive and popular. The Last of Us is an online game with a post-apocalyptic theme.
Seems to me perfectly natural for video games to be source materials for movies, given their level of sophistication, and their lowering the barrier towards being interactive.
Resident Evil the movie franchise did not need any gaming experience to be enjoyed by horror movie fans. Game Of Thrones or Lord of The Rings could easily be rich pickings for a superior video game.
I had no knowledge of this TV streaming series. I was intrigued by the huge buzz of anticipation surrounding this second series, and the first season being one of the most popular to be screened on Amazon Prime.
As in past movie or television adaptations of video games, prior experience is not necessary to understand the landscape and the environment.
Fallout stretches across time from the post-World War Two America of the Fifties to the post-apocalyptic wasteland of a few centuries into the future.
Nuclear mutually assured destruction (MAD-ness) has occurred in 2077. Prior to this, global corporation Vault-Tec have built a plethora of underground bunkers to house the surviving populations. Humanity have become the equivalent of mole people.
Although there are many time-shifts within the unfolding narrative, the journey is set around two centuries after the man-made annihilation event.
What do the bunker dwellers encounter on the surface from the vastly changed and mutated world?
We meet the bounty hunter Ghoul (Walter Goggins) who is facing imminent execution by hanging from a bunch of ferals. His very reluctant travelling companion Lucy (Ella Purnell) is nearby watching the drama unfold from inside a large cartoon dinosaur statue.
Immediately we are thrust into the dystopian Mad Max environment of desert wasteland and the harsh windswept environment above-ground. What forces were at play on the population who were excluded from the havens of the underground bunkers.
There are time shifts back to idyllic America of Eisenhower era Fifties. Western seaboard California suburbs and classic Rock’n’roll and jukebox Pop music.
In the bunkers of Vault-Tec, where apparently, they use old- technology TV screens and the internet has failed to survive.
One vault has pods containing cryogenically frozen inhabitants, expecting to be reanimated to a better time.
On the surface we encounter the Brotherhood of Steel and a central protagonist Maximus (Aaron Moten). Massive metallic suits of body armour reminding me of the classic Robocop on machine steroids.
There is a wicked and quite black sense of humour which invests the production. Heads and viscera explode and splatter. The wicked humour of the original George A Romero zombie movie (Dawn of The Dead in particular) is magnified.
Grotesque mutant creatures are in abundance and inhabit the post-apocalyptic world. David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly, but more repulsive. I have a flash of recognition to William Burroughs and the adaptation of his famous novel, Naked Lunch, which Cronenberg also filled with nightmare hallucinogenic creatures.
Watching this unfold on the big I-Max screen is a total blast. Humour is Monty Python mad and totally self-indulgent.
The most compelling character I saw (after the Ghoul) was Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan). A central figure in the malevolent scientist role, who uncannily echoes the recent Anthony Fauci and his recent fall from grace.
I find out later, that MacLean is Lucy’s father, and it is her quest to find him, and to explain the sinister nature of his work, which is one driving narrative of the series. Not far from the time-travelling special agent Dale Cooper of the third Twin Peaks series from 2018.
Fallout Season Two is quite mad and frantic, and often wickedly laugh-out-loud. Certainly makes me want to binge-watch the first series.
Rev. Orange Peel