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The infinite potential of video games is also beginning to bear fruit on the small TV screen. "Fallout" is a joy to watch, all in one go. The credit goes to Jonathan Nolan and his team for having managed to create a true investigative journey, where the adventures (colorful, varied, always evolving) intertwine well with a look towards the past in search of explanations. Some editing choices seem to recall the "pulverized" timeframe management of his big brother and knight Christopher in “Oppenheimer.”
The strength of the script lies in juxtaposing the post-apocalyptic Wild West scenario of the outer world with the claustrophobic and "mute" dystopia of the vaults. The degradation of the barbarized man is contrasted with that of the turbo-capitalist man who takes his “values” to the extreme.
Successful characters, particularly due to the choice of giving each one a past, an open wound, an original trauma that becomes the driving force of their actions. Even the seemingly ruthless skull cowboy has a rich emotional background full of details and nuances that communicate over time, two hundred years apart.
There's splatter and the most caustic social criticism, there's western and science fiction, but above all, there's an always slightly ironic style that turns the bloodshed into slapstick brawls, often transfiguring the inhumanity reached by man in 2296 in a grotesque key (and therefore even more terrifying, in my view). Retro music doesn’t play a marginal role in this sense.
- I thought I would become a sex slave.
- Oh no, what barbarity! I just have to remove your organs.
The narrative mechanisms are very well-oiled and allow us to follow the various plots into which the story branches without difficulty. The dialogues never forgo the psychological and social portrait, showing the different (and opposing) aberrations reached by humankind: the wild violence on the surface and the softest and blindest weakness in the depths of the bunkers.
Some scenes are memorable, like the one on the bridge. The “utopian” education of the girl from vault 33 clashes with the survival instinct of “those above.” Will civilization or instinct prevail? The answer isn’t so obvious because the dystopia is dual.
If we want to pinpoint a structural flaw in the narrative, it's the too-frequent repetition of the pattern where the protagonists get into trouble, only to miraculously get out of it, more or less unharmed. It's a chaotic world, a playground for a screenwriter who has endless tricks up their sleeve to make practically anything happen at any time. This is entertaining because the adventures are delightful, but in the long run, it can become tiresome.
Not to mention that the magnificent crescendo of tension regarding the investigation into the past, the nuclear disaster, and the creation of the vaults melts into a revelation that some might find somewhat simplistic, especially given such a detailed staging.
The series has obviously been renewed for a second season.
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