Hey folks this is rker and we’ve just gotten our first look at the upcoming Fallout series being produced by Amazon which was releasing in Spring 2024 and things are looking super promising Vanity Fair released an article today link to that in the description for you to check out for yourself to see all
These images as big as you can but we’re going to go through this article now together and talk through why I am now so hyped for this series video game adaptations have been kind of hid and miss some of them are terrible a few of them are
Great some end up mediocre but I am cautiously optimistic maybe a little bit too optimistic right now for this one so first off this image here a vault dweller coming out of the Vault classic Fallout Vibes the suit everything already looking perfect so this new series is
Debuting April 12th and the series was developed by the Westworld creators husband and wife Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy I really enjoyed Westworld if you folks have not seen Westworld check out season 1 at least it arguably falls off in later Seasons but the first season is really strong and it’s a dystopian
Sci-Fi series so you know it’s right there thematically with Fallout so right off the bat just seeing this already filled me with confidence and this story takes place 219 years after the Fallout and I think that puts us just a few years after Fallout 4 so we’re far
Enough after Fallout 4 that we can have a new story but not so far that we can’t have cameos from familiar characters sounds like our lead character is Lucy played by Ella Pernell who played Jinx in Netflix’s Arcane series I mean the voice of jinx but still I really enjoy
Jinx’s character so also promising Luc has lived her entire life inside a Subterranean Vault standard Fallout story right but then a crisis forces her to venture above on a rescue mission and Nolan told Vanity Fair the games are about the culture of division and Haves and Have Nots that unfortunately have
Only gotten more and more acute in this country and around the world over the last decades that is a recurring theme throughout the Fallout series you have like these different classes and cast systems that have formed you have the the the degenerate ghouls you have the the the Brotherhood it’s a setting that
Basically just takes all of our cultural problems of the day and exacerbates them H hundredfold so Nolan himself directed the first three episodes and he says that they get to talk about social satire in a wonderful speculative fiction way I think we’re all looking at the world and going God things seem to
Be heading in a very very frightening Direction I know some people are going to look at that and say oh no it’s probably going to get all preachy Fallout has always been a social commentary as long as the tone of it Remains the Same it’s fine as Westworld demonstrated Nolan has a fascination
With a mix of Mythology and psychology that make up human nature his characters typically believe one thing about themselves while behaving in a radically different way under pressure please watch season one of Westworld it’s really good we don’t want to spoil it here but uh he previously created the
Series Person of Interest about a world in which crimes and terrorism can be predicted in advance and co-wrote such films as the prestige Love The Prestige The Dark Knight obviously and Interstellar I really enjoyed it with his filmmaker brother Christopher Nolan I never realized Christopher Nolan had a brother
And this is him and that’s awesome Jonathan who goes by Jonah is fond of plunging his fictional test subjects into situations that unsettle their deeply held beliefs so finding out that this was the brother of Christopher Nolan and he helped co-write the prestige Interstellar again fills me
With great confidence here you might say yeah but Westworld kind of fell off ah okay reasonable he says about the main character Lucy is charming and Plucky and strong and then you see she’s confronted with the reality of hey maybe the supposedly virtuous things you grew up with are not necessarily that
Virtuous if they are virtuous they’re couched in a circumstantial virtuousness it’s a luxury virtue you have your point of view because you never ran out of food right you guys were able to share everything because you had enough to share so the series tracks her collision with the hard reality of other people’s
Experiences and what happened to the people who Frank we’re left behind left to die and this is a great way to establish a setting while having a character who the audience could insert themselves into this perspective because we’re sort of coming from the same perspective of Lucy we’re not coming
From a world of of of lack so her discovering these things about the setting allows us as the viewers to discover along with her and she’s going to react to things in the same way that we would feel about them because for one else in this setting well no that’s not
Horrible that’s just normal but for her and to us yo that is horrible and then look at this image here look at that armor it looks a little cosplay but it also looks very Fallout now apparently Nolan and Joy were determined to maintain the Morant comedy that you see
Throughout the series and Todd Howard himself seems fully on board with this series quote we had a lot of conversations over the style of humor the level of violence the style of violence and he’s actually an executive producer on the show look Fallout can be very dramatic and dark and
Post-apocalyptic but you need to weave in a little bit of a wink I think they threaded that needle really well on the TV show imagine a Fallout show without any of that humor that’s part of what makes Fallout special it’s not a comedy but it’s humor of contrast right it
Helps bring out that satire the little so Vault boy not only appears in the show but the imagery even gets an or origin story which is not going to be spoiled that could go either way sometimes I feel some things don’t need to be explained and when you give them
An origin story it it kills it but sometimes the origin story does enhance so I’m hoping we’re going to get it enhanced here but Howard says that was something that they came up with that’s just really smart so the fact that it’s smart cuz to me it’s like when the
Explanation is lazy like oh why is Han Solo named solo because he’s by himself and and oh God I like that better when it wasn’t explained and we got the Airship slair facility here and fans of the game should know that everything in this series is officially part of Fallout
Lore so it is fully Canon and bethesa was careful to make sure the scripts could coexist with previous story lines from the gaming titles Howard says we view what’s happening in the show as Canon that’s what’s great when someone else looks at your work and then translates it into some fashion and
Howard admits to being envious of some of the TV shows interpretations and additions I sort of looked at it like ah why didn’t we think of that that’s the kind of stuff you want to hear when the show’s ideas are so good it makes the original creators envious now apparently
Howard was always resistant to the idea of a Fallout film or TV show quote I’ve taken countless meetings with producers or heard pitches and nothing ever felt like the right fit or maybe I was wondering a little how will it affect the franchise I took a very cautious approach but Howard loved Interstellar
You can see its influences in Starfield and he said about Nolan the movies he’s worked on are some of my favorites and I’d heard that he liked video games and had an eye for that stuff I said to somebody and I won’t say who but I was taking a meeting with another producer
And said before I talk to other people I want to hear that Jonah Nolan will never do it so this led to a conversation Nolan was interested Nolan and joy got the rights to the show they started making new characters and Howard said that he was sold when Nolan and his team
Proposed building an entirely new story within the existing realm of Fallout quote I did not want to do an interpretation of an existing story we did that was the other thing a lot of pictures that we got in the past were you know this is the movie of Fallout 3
And I was like yeah we told that story I don’t have a lot of interest seeing those translated I was interested in someone telling a unique Fallout story treat it like a game it gives the creators of the series their own playground to play in and look at this
This this is looking great look at the scale of this they’re full I mean this is not CGI I love that it’s not CGI again it looks a little cosplay but it’s it looks Fallout but I can see someone walk around in the convention with this but just the difficulty of having
Someone in that suit at that scale we’ll have to see them in motion sometimes whether something looks like cosplay or not comes down down to the weight of things sometimes you kind of see things flopping around showing that they’re like made of plastic or whatever but the
Scale and look here is spoton now as the show progresses Lucy meets some other characters here that’ll be other lead characters one is the wannabe Soldier Maximus he grew up above ground but he was also raised in a sort of family the Brotherhood of Steel Nolan says it’s a
Little bit of the Marine Corps it’s a little bit of the Knights Templar it’s this kind of weird Fusion in the absence of a federal government you just had all this military hardware lying around who would get it and how would they maintain control of it the answer is the
Brotherhood Nolan describes the Brotherhood as being fueled by a mutated version of patriotism religion loyalty and fraternity and it sounds like he understands A brotherhood very well here these are the guys in their shining power armor and Maximus is basically a squire so this has got to be Maximus
Over here he’s a squire to these pseudo Knights quote this is a drawing on the classic R3 Ian Knight Legends where life was cheap and you had a squire as long as they were useful they had to prove their worth they had to prove their Valor and their strength and if they
Didn’t they were kind of cast aside this is a beautiful shot right here look look at that that is a classic Fallout looking town maybe a bit too much Greenery in the background is that trees growing up on the junk but overall this this feels very Fallout and I love the
Framing of this image noan says one of the things we’re trying to gently sidestep here is that kind of binary thinking like they’re the good guys or the bad guys whoever the good guys and the bad guys were they destroyed the whole world so now we’re in a much more
Gray area again very Fallout never really any clear Good Guys sometimes clearer bad guys but sometimes even the bad guys themselves it’s like well I I kind of understand I I get it like you’re terrible you’re awful I see what happened to you and why you became that
Way so I kind of get it without condoning I understand so Lucy’s father is actually the overseer of Vault 33 and oh my gosh Michael Emerson is in this that’s Ben Linus from Lost I I loved lost one of my favorite shows of all time and Ben lius Michael Emerson here
He was what a sneak that guy he played his role so well we’re talking a world with gray yeah you never know you never know of that guy so Michael Emerson is playing an enigmatic researcher named wizig and most of the different parties in the setting are going to be chasing
An artifact that has the potential to radically change the power dynamic in this world my first thought is that it’s going to be some kind of energy thing or or something to either generate power or food or water and then look at this image here oh he’s missing a nose but
This this looks I could see this in a game this is Fallout 4 this is Fallout 3 this imagery the tones the colors everything here this could be right out of Fallout the Sinister boun Bounty Hunter known as the ghoul played by Walton Goggins okay so that’s Walton
Goggins under there he’s a gruesomely scar Rough Rider who has a sense of Honor but also a ruthless streak well he’s a ghoul he’s The Good the Bad and the Ugly all rolled into one he’s existed for hundreds of years 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 game schools are typically Cannon F mindless zombies whose bodies have been mutated by radiation mindless is a little harsh you
Have well this is written by Vanity Fair they they might be this isn’t Nolan saying this the ghoul is a legend the ghoul distinct among His Kind for his cleverness and cunning there are ghouls with brains with some thinking ability there’s still something of Cooper Howard left Within his ghoul form Nolan says
Walton’s equally Adept at drama and comedy which is so difficult right yeah so I I mostly know Walton from comedic roles 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 this feels very Westworld again without going into spoilers he compares the ghoul to the poet Virgil and Dante’s Inferno he becomes our guide and our protagonist in that older world even as we understand him to be the antagonist
At the end of the world that’s an interesting way of giving depth to the villain here there’s certainly going for a more sympathetic character I wonder if that means a Redemption Arc or we’ll see so he’s smarter than the average ghoul they’re dialing back his ghoulish appearance here’s what he looks like
Gosh the nose the nose by itself is enough to sell it but yeah this this definitely reads as a ghoul they didn’t have to go further than that that’s fine but they basically they’re talking about how they can’t load up an actor with too many Prosthetics you need to act through
That stuff when you hire an actor you want them to be able to emote so the ghoul is supposed to be the polar opposite of Lucy he’s got a lot of mileage on him but he’s still got a Swagger and kind of a charm to him well
Of course it’s it’s goggin Nolan says that it’s a dark World in many ways but the games were fun to play fun to explore and I think that was a mandate for us and to make sure that it was enjoyable to spend time in this universe
So despite the Grim aspects to still be able to find the fun and and again that that is the key to Fallout take Fallout and remove all the humor on the charm and it’s just this like really depressing game here we get a shot a bit
More of the full suit and you know I I I could see a different show having taken a different direction with both the Vault suit and the the the power armor here and like doing like no we got to make this look more realistic uh like I can imagine the Vault looking grittier
Maybe it’s just kind of black but I love that they went with that garish blue it helps highlight the fact that she’s naive she’s like the brightest color in this dreary miserable world and they could have substituted this either with a a CGI monstrosity which would have
Been terrible or just something that was easier you know not 9 ft tall just sort of like a SWAT kind of style uniform but I love that they remain true to the authenticity of it in the small details in the big picture I have a great
Feeling about this I hope to not be disappointed but folks sound off in the comments with your thoughts again April 12th is when this is debuting and I hope that this one’s going to be a win thanks for watching especially thanks to my twitch patreon and YouTube supporters
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