Prime Video’s Fallout creators, the husband and wife team of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, confirmed the video game adaptation will feature heavy social commentary.
Walton Goggins (The Ghoul) in “Fallout”
Speaking about the upcoming series with Vanity Fair’s Anthony Breznican, Nolan said, “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.”
“We get to talk about that in a wonderful, speculative-fiction way,” he added. “I think we’re all looking at the world and going, ‘God, things seem to be heading in a very, very frightening direction.”
Brotherhood of Steel and Vertibirds in “Fallout”
Specifically, the series will provide commentary on people’s morals and will do so through the character of Lucy, a vault dweller played by Ella Purnell.
First, Nolan detailed, “So many of us have such naive ideas, even now, about everyone else’s experiences, and it’s one of the things I love about America. It’s this giant, manic collection of different experiences, different points of view.”
He then explained how the show will use Lucy to moralize to viewers, “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.”
Nolan went on to declare that the series follows “her collision with the hard reality of other people’s experiences and what happened to the people who, frankly, were left behind, left to die.”
Ella Purnell (Lucy) in “Fallout”
To this point, while describing the character of Maximus, who is a squire in the Brotherhood of Steel, Nolan states, “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,” he asserted.
As for the Brotherhood of Steel, Nolan described them as “a little bit of the Marine Corps. It’s a little bit of the Knights Templar. It’s this kind of weird fusion” and “a mutated version of patriotism, religion, loyalty, and fraternity.”
Power Suit and Aaron Moten (Maximus) in “Fallout”
Todd Howard, the director of Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 and currently the Executive Producer of Bethesda Game Studios, the developer of the Fallout series, confirmed the series would also be in canon with the games.
“We view what’s happening in the show as canon,” he said. “That’s what’s great, when someone else looks at your work and then translates it in some fashion.”
In fact, the show will reportedly provide an origin for the iconic Vault Boy logo. Howard described this origin as “really smart.”
He also noted that he was jealous of a number of ideas that the series came up with telling Vanity Fair, “I sort of looked at it like, ‘Ah, why didn’t we do that?’
Ella Purnell (Lucy) in “Fallout”
Not only is the story in canon, but it is not an adaptation of any of the games, but an original story. Howard noted, “I did not want to do an interpretation of an existing story we did.”
“That was the other thing—a lot of pitches were, you know, ‘This is the movie of Fallout 3…’ 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,” he elaborated.
To craft this original story Nolan and Joy tapped Captain Marvel co-writer Geneva Robertson-Dworet and POrtlandia writer Graham Wagner to be showrunners.
As for what the story is about, Nolan detailed that a number of factions within the show are “chasing an artifact that has the potential to radically change the power dynamic in this world.”
Walton Goggins (The Ghoul) in “Fallout”
The Fallout series arrives on Prime Video on April 12, 2024.
What do you make of how Nolan is pitching the series with heavy social commentary?
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Wait…wait….a movie that includes a Captain Marvel writer is going to be SOCIAL COMMENTARY and about the “haves and have-nots” and say that good and evil are not absolutes and…and….
Wow. What else is new nowadays? And us silly old-fashioned good guys thought that it was only sex the young socialists were “non-binary” about!
This show, already screams DOA(Dead On Arrival)