Totally rad

• Published date: 16 April 2024
• Publication title: Signal

IT’S 2024 and we’ve had the critically-acclaimed prestige TV of The Last of Us, a Super Mario Bros Movie that made 1.3 billion US dollars, and an incredible Netflix show that people somehow made out of League of Legends of all things, and yet each new video game adaptation still tends to arrive as something of a dicey prospect in the minds of gamers and non-gamers alike — perhaps because we remember the likes of the previous Super Mario Bros. movie (hey, at least Bob Hoskins’ moustache looked right). So the announcement of a big-budget treatment of the venerable post-nuclear-holocaust RPG series Fallout from Prime caused some excitement, but some trepidation too. But hey, it’s here, and it’s really pretty good! Maybe we’re finally laying this collective video game curse of ours to rest

Fallout starts with The End: in the game series’ retro-futuristic world of 2077 (think the politics, morals and aesthetic of the ’1950s, with a sprinkling of Jetsons-style robotics and other technology), former screen cowboy Cooper Howard (Walter Goggins, as arresting here as he generally is in everything) has been reduced to entertaining at children’s birthday parties. International tensions are evidently high, but the revellers would rather tune out the grim geopolitical circumstances — until suddenly the bombs start landing, and blissful ignorance is very definitely off the menu. It’s no-holds-barred, every-man-for-himself nuclear war, and the sight of Cooper scooping up his daughter and riding away from the mushroom clouds on horseback is the first of several indelible images we’re going to be treated to across the course of the series.

Cut to: some time later, and we’re in Vault 33, a vast underground shelter designed for people — and then, their descendants — to ride out such an apocalypse in relative comfort for centuries. It’s an insular, practical and very chipper society, frozen in the ‘‘golly-gee!’’ mode of the era of its founding. Inhabitants dutifully up-skill in a range of pursuits, mindful of their wildly optimistic collective mission to eventually refound apple-pie America on the surface, whatever state it may be be in.

Naive though they are, they haven’t survived without practical consideration of the realities of their circumstances. “Messing around with your cousin is all well and good for kids. But it’s not a sustainable long-term sexual practice, y’know?” Lucy (Ella Purnell) kindly tells her romantically-disappointed relative.

She’s decided it’s time to...