With video game adaptations no longer as routinely disappointing as they once were, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy's upcoming Prime Video adaptation of Fallout has generated a fair bit of excitement among gamers. Now, have a first look and details courtesy of Vanity Fair (via SFFGazette.com).
Just like in the games, a nuclear war breaks out across Earth in the year 2077 (which, for some reason, is heavily inspired by 1940s America) before the story jumps forward by 219 years to the post-apocalyptic wasteland which is left behind. Ella Purnell stars as Lucy, a character who leaves her subterranean vault and ventures out into a world fans of the Fallout series have spent hundreds of hours exploring across multiple video games.
However, that doesn't mean there won't be new ground for even the most hardcore games to discover.
Todd Howard, the director of 2008's Fallout 3 and 2015's Fallout 4 and an executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, reveals that the Fallout TV series will finally explore Vault Boy's origin; the wider story, meanwhile, will also fit into the franchise's larger mythology.
"We view what’s happening in the show as canon," he explains. "That’s what’s great, when someone else looks at your work and then translates it in some fashion. I sort of looked at it like, 'Ah, why didn’t we do that?'"
As Lucy sets out to explore the world for the first time, she meets aspiring soldier Maximus (Aaron Moten), part of a group of brutal warriors known as the Brotherhood of Steel, all of whom are decked out in familiar power armour.
Kyle MacLachlan, meanwhile, stars as Lucy's father, the "overseer" of Vault 33, Moisés Arias plays her brother, and Lost alum Michael Emerson is a researcher named Wilzig. However, the biggest surprise is that Walton Goggins is set to play a bounty hunter dubbed The Ghoul.
We'd expected him to be the show's lead protagonist. Instead, "The Ghoul is a gruesomely scarred roughrider who has a code of honor, but also a ruthless streak...the show occasionally flashes back to the human being he once was, a father and husband named Cooper Howard, before the nuclear holocaust turned the world into a cinder and transformed him into an undead, noseless sharp-shooting fiend."
In the Fallout games, the Ghouls are typically portrayed as little more than mindless cannon fodder, so this is an intriguing twist. Nolan says, "Walton’s equally adept at drama and comedy, which is so difficult. There is a chasm in time and distance between who this guy was and who he’s become, which for me creates an enormous dramatic question: What happened to this guy? So we’ll walk backwards into that."
Fallout is currently set to premiere on April 12, 2024, and, thanks to Prime Video, you can check out some first-look stills below.