Amazon’s new Fallout show is the latest in the companies’ big, splashy adaptation plans—and it really wants you to know it’s taking the retro aesthetic and charm of the classic video game series to heart, beneath its pulsing, murkily irradiated post-apocalypse.
Today Amazon released a new trailer for Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s take on the beloved Interplay/Bethesda RPG games. The show, following in the footsteps of those classics, follows a lone vault dweller—an inhabitant of the mysterious, numbered underground bunkers/social experiment chambers built to withstand a devastating thermonuclear war—named Lucy (Star Trek: Prodigy’s Ella Purnell), who leaves the confines of Vault 33 to brave the wastelands left behind after the war, and the kooky, occasionally violently irradiated inhabitants who have carved out a new living among them.
There’s plenty of faithful hallmarks from the games here—and of course the use of “I Don’t Want to Set the World On Fire,” famously used in the opening of Fallout 3—like the irradiated ghouls (represented largely by Walton Goggins’ wandering outlaw, who appears here both in his irradiated and pre-apocalypse human form), to the sinister Brotherhood of Steel and their iconic power armor suits. But Fallout mostly feels Fallout less through the aesthetic connections and more by just how much it’s playing around with the humor among the horror of its harsh post-apocalyptic setting. If the show can keep it up, there’s a lot of wry humor to be had among all the violence.
Fallout, which also stars Aaron Moten, Moisés Arias, Kyle MacLachlan, Sarita Choudhury, Michael Emerson, Leslie Uggams, and more, is set to begin streaming on Amazon Prime starting April 11 (a day earlier than previously planned—with all episodes dropping on the same day.
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