Let’s make this clear from the beginning: I have never played a Fall game. Aside from recognizing his ubiquitous blonde-haired mascot and understanding that it takes place after some sort of nuclear apocalypse, he knew nothing about the franchise before pressing play on the first episode of the TV adaptation.
But co-writers and co-creators Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, along with director Jonathan Nolan and his creative partner Lisa Joy, firmly convinced me. consequences side in two easy steps. First, they began with one of the most terrifying nuclear attacks I have ever seen on film or television. Second, they made some funny incest jokes.
Oh really! It’s a kind of yin and yang. Adapted from the video game series created by Tim Cain, Fall argues that when it comes to making broad science fiction satire, you might as well have your cake and eat it: you can depict the horrors of devastation as honestly as possible and still make some sick jokes along the way.
The bombs are dropped during a prologue set in a gruesome retro future, one in which the white-bread American culture of the pre-postwar rock and roll period apparently lasted more than a century, along with the Cold War. The United States and China are so close to the brink of nuclear war that the president has been transferred to an undisclosed location; On television, a meteorologist leaves the live broadcast because he doesn’t see the point of a seven-day forecast.
Our central character in this medium-term future is Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), a kind of famous cowboy who falls on hard times after a porce. He is performing tricks for a rich kid’s birthday at a house in the hills overlooking the nearby city skyline. He ends up being too perfect a point of view for his adorable daughter Janey (Teagan Meredith) to be the first to witness the first explosion.
It all unfolds excruciatingly slowly, as Cooper tries to assure Janey that it’s nothing more than smoke, until the familiar mushroom fire rises into the sky. He hits a shock wave. The glass shatters. The children run. Parents fight for shelter. Skyscrapers shatter into small pieces. And Cooper and Janey ride away on their horse as explosion after explosion flashes and blooms, erasing all hope.
How’s that for a vacancy? I thought it would be hard to get over it. 3 Body problem for vulgar displays of apocalyptic power on television this year, but I was wrong. This is something that makes your heart race and your mouth dry.
The action resumes more than two centuries later in two very different communities, so different that it is not immediately evident that they existed in the same time period. The first is the Vault, a cutesy, cheerful replica of idealized circa-1950s America preserved underground to keep the torch of civilization burning, or something along those lines. (I wonder if the Silo The gang is in there somewhere too.) Here our protagonist is a plucky young woman named Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), who engages in a variety of all-American activities when she’s not doing “cousin stuff” in preparation for her eventual fixing. marriage.
Unfortunately, Lucy’s father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), the overseer of this particular vault (it’s number 33 in a series), is better at giving inspirational speeches than finding a partner. In a routine ritual gone wrong, he accidentally opens the vault doors for surface raiders, posing as fellow vault dwellers, by marrying Lucy to one. The wedding night goes very well for both parties… until filming begins.
It doesn’t take long (perhaps the moment when her husband is cleaning up the post-coital mess with the curtains) for Lucy to realize that the barbarians have breached the gates, so to speak. After sending her “husband” into a brutal fight with knives and broken glass, she emerges to find the entire placid community engulfed in bloody chaos. The raiders, led by the imposing Lee Moldavier (Sarita Choudhury), are on a rampage, slaughtering everyone they can while gorging themselves on the fruits of these pampered underground’s labors.
Many people are murdered bloodily. Lucy runs around with a wedding dress, a gun, and a bandolier, commando style in more ways than one. Her friend Steph (Sannabel O’Hagan) opens fire with a fork sticking out of her eye. People fly through the air and get into picnic tables like road house. Moldaver hints at some secret connection to Lucy’s mother. It’s a funny thing as far as massacres go.
In the end, the assailants take Hank away, leaving the rest to their fate, but Lucy doesn’t stay still. Against everyone’s advice and orders, she heads to the surface to search for her father alone.
Maybe he’ll meet our other future hero, a young soldier named Maximus (Aaron Moten). As part of the sworn military order of the Brotherhood of Steel, he spends most of his time in the barracks, joking with his companions, all of whom look and act as if they are preparing to leave for Korea. Instead, his true goal is to become first a squire and then a knight, a super soldier clad in power armor similar to that of Iron Man.
However, when the time comes to select a new squire, the powers that be, represented by the stern cleric Quintus (award-winning and memorable playwright mr robot heavy Michael Cristofer), pass it on to his friend Dane (Xelia Mendes-Jones, a powerful presence in The wheel of time). But when Dane’s boot is equipped with a razor blade, Maximus quickly goes from prime suspect to replacement squire. (For what it’s worth, I don’t think he did it, but you certainly have to understand that he wants to be a squire enough to be okay with that happening.)
But soon there will be one more figure wandering the wastelands, this one in search of a man fleeing a legendary place called the Enclave. Turns out he’s a familiar guy: thanks to the magic of sci-fi radiation, Cooper Howard is alive and indestructible 219 years after the bombs fell, although he looks much worse for wear and seems like a pretty terrible guy now. , all things considered. The first thing he does when a group of Western-style bounty hunters dig him up from the ground where he is being held and tortured by a crime boss is kill them and take on his search as his own. A helpful title now refers to him as THE GHOUL, which seems appropriate.
We’re only one episode in, but so far. Fall I find it superior to equally ultra-violent and over-the-top sci-fi/fantasy comic riffs on the American West, such as Preacher either Mrs. Davis. Furthermore, despite some superficial similarities, it bears very little real resemblance to Nolan and Joy’s previous dystopian-western future television series. Western world which is hardly worth mentioning. This speaks well of the team’s creativity and their refusal to repeat their own work.
Looking Fall It’s a bit like entering a hall of mirrors. All the post-apocalyptic material taken from film and television and then absorbed and reinterpreted by the game series (neo-Western material, barbarian raiders, utopian/dystopian underground communities, irradiated mutants, etc.) is being returned to the screen as a narrative. fiction.
Curiously, it works. Honestly, it feels fresh to see throwback tropes like futuristic planned communities, badlands cowboys, etc., instead of the dirty, gritty aesthetic of the aforementioned. Silo or the strangely overrated The last of us, another video game adaptation. However, some of the aesthetic choices could have used another pass; Does the future have the same blue and orange color scheme as every other show in 2024? If the Vault setting is the work of a movie projector anyway, a nice riff on Oklahoma!The vivid splendor of Todd-AO could have worked very well.
But while that may qualitatively impact the show, it doesn’t impede its goals, which are to make a fun video game show with an R-rated sense of humor, some gross-out stuff, and the occasional world-historical atrocity. Remind us that it is not always a good time. I would say they did what they set out to do.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about television forRolling Stone,Vulture,The New York TimesandAnywhere that has it, In fact. He and his family live on Long Island.
