Re: Fallout TV

I wonder if I will like it if I never played Fallout games.


Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

So, speaking of that Fallout TV show...

I had to take a sick-day, so - in between my many 'oh god I still feel
awful' naps, I binge-watched the entire series. Hey, I finally got
some value out of our Amazon Prime subscription. And despite my
earlier predictions, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.

Which isn't to say I necessarily think it was a good show. But I
definitely expected a lot worse.

To start with, you know how recent TV-shows-based-on-video games have
been loose interpretations of the source material? I mean, they made
MasterChief in the Halo TV show a talkative wimp whom nobody respected
or listened to, and - for a show about a space war - the TV show was
really light on space-war stuff. You can't fault the Fallout show for
the same thing.

This was a TV that went HEAVY into fan service. I mean, I don't think
there was one scene where you didn't see something that instantly
reminded you of the games, if it wasn't outright referencing some
event or character. Very little felt out-of-place from the games. You
could well imagine pretty much every location or situation appearing
in the games themselves. I mean, it was really, really, really heavy
into the fan-service. If that's all you want from the show, well,
lemme tell you, you're gonna walk away very satisfied.

This did come at a cost, however; if you're not familiar with the
game's lore, a lot of the references will slide past you and the world
will seem very, very weird. Like, who is Vaultec and RobCo? What was
the battle of Anchorage about? Why does this supermarket suddenly have
a robot? What is the Enclave? Who are the Brotherhood of Steel and why
do they have powered armor? If you stick with the show long enough,
some of these things get explained, but I'm not sure the game will
appeal enough to non-fans to keep them watching that long.

Tonally, the game is also much more pessimistic than the games. Sure,
the "Fallout" games were never particularly optimistic to begin with,
but they did have an underlying theme of people trying to get together
and rebuild, only to have some assholes - whether its raiders or
mutants or whatever - upend all their efforts, leaving a trail of
death and destruction it their wake. It's the post-apocalypse, after
all. But the Fallout TV show essentially postulates that /everyone/ is
a self-serving greedy asshole (with the exception of the naive
fresh-from-the-vault protagonist, of course, who serves as the
everyman character that the audience can relate to). It's
exceptionally grim, and honestly, made the watching a lot more of a
chore than it should have been. Hopefully, the producers will lighten
things up a bit in the next season.

One thing I noticed was that the game referred to (pre-war) America's
enemies only as 'Commies' or 'Reds', with the unspoken implication -
especially given the retraux 1950s-esque setting - that it was the
Russians that were the bad guys. Fans of the games of course know that
the "Great War" was fought between the US and China. There was
absolutely no reference - not even in passing - to this fact. I guess
Amazon (and possibly Microsoft) were too worried about offending their
biggest business partner to be open about what the source material
said (in fairness, they never outright said it was anybody other than
China either).

The show was - in my opinion - also delighted a bit too much in its
gore and black comedy. Ever want to see a close-up of a skull being
crushed by a power-armor glove? A wounded foot with its toes literally
falling off? The games always reveled in gore to a degree, but the
lack of fidelity always made it feel more comic book. The comedy bits
also felt a bit off - maybe not for the games (which also could be
ridiculous) - but given the overall tone of the TV show, it felt out
of place.

Speaking of the special effects, I have to say I was underwhelmed. It
all felt very low budget. The greenscreening was all fairly obvious,
and the CGI monsters and characters didn't blend in well with the
foreground (this was especially problematic with the powered-armor, as
those Brotherhood of Steel warriors were on-screen a lot). The VFX got
the job done, but the obviousness of it broke the immersion of the
show often.

The story itself was... okay. Lone vaultie goes out into the big bad
world (to save her dad), meets up with unscrupulous characters, learns
that Vault-Tec (the guys who made the eponymous fallout shelters) are
all evil comic-book villain-style evil scumbags. There are occasional
side-quests, lots of bang-bang-bang shootouts, and our hero has to
struggle between her virtuous upbringing and the realities of life in
the wasteland. It was all rather humdrum and without any real
surprises. The acting was fine, even if the actual dialog was rather
stiff and unconvincing. But like the games it was based on, it was
really the setting and not the story or characters that were the star
of the show.

All in all, I found the whole thing rather average. If you're a fan of
the series, you'll probably love it for all the fan-service. If you
just want dumb action and gore, it's okay for that too. But overall I
found it was too much in love with its source material, and didn't
offer a compelling reason behind its license to keep watching.

Still, at least we have ONE example of a TV show/movie that doesn't
completely ignore the game to do its own thing and then slap the
licensed titled on it. It had to happen eventually, I suppose.

--
"Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins." --James 4:17. I need to more goods and less sins.
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