Fallout, Prime Video, review: nuclear annihilation shouldn’t be this much fun

Having a blast: British actress Ella Purnell as Lucy in Fallout – Amazon Prime Video

Is it too soon for a sequel to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer? Such is the radioactive delight the director’s younger brother, Jonathan, serves up, in roundabout fashion, with post-apocalyptic action-comedy Fallout (Prime Video). Where Oppenheimer was about the dawn of the atomic age in the early 1940s, Fallout takes up the story a decade later in an alternative history United States in which Eisenhower-era, postwar America is devastated by a nuclear conflagration. It’s enjoyably juvenile – less Death, the destroyer of worlds than a cartoonish time-killer piled high with outrageous violence.

As one of the brains behind the TV series Westworld, Jonathan would know a thing or two about huge bombs. Along with his wife, Lisa Joy – also his creative partner on Fallout – he masterminded four ponderous years of humourless riffing on the hammy Michael Crichton movie about robots running amok in a theme park. Finally put out of its misery in 2022, Westworld was a proverbial tree falling in an empty forest. The entire world had already forgotten it ever existed.

Nolan and Joy went on to adapt William Gibson’s noir-ish cyberpunk novel, The Peripheral, only for the plug to be pulled after a single season. If the lesson was that there is no space in streaming for hyper-intellectual, slightly po-faced sci-fi, then Nolan and Joy have taken that to heart. Fallout marks a stark shift by the duo: the tone is playful, the gore gratuitous. Most importantly, its bouncy, eye-popping energy makes for perfect bingeing. It’s a lark – not something anyone could say of Westworld (or, for that matter, Oppenheimer).

As with the video game, the setting is Mad Max meets the Wild West. Some 200 years have elapsed since the downfall of humanity, and in their subterranean Vaults, wealthy survivors live in relative comfort and safety. They include Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), a pampered young woman about to be married off by her father (Kyle MacLachlan). But her wedding day turns into a nightmare when it emerges that her husband-to-be is part of a raiding party intent on ransacking the Vault.

In the melee, Lucy’s dad is captured, meaning she must leave the Vault, where she has spent her entire life, and explore the Californian wasteland above. It’s quite the hellscape, teeming with zombie-like mutants and monastic zealots stomping around in metal exoskeletons straight out of the Warhammer 40K wargame.

Fallout fancies itself as satire, with the Vault portrayed as a nightmare parody of picket-fence Fifties suburbia. The show also has an annoying habit of scoring super-violent action scenes with upbeat country music (Johnny Cash is a favourite) – as if the contrast were inherently subversive. Yet it bursts with enthusiasm, and Nolan and Joy must be credited with capturing the juvenile charm of the video game.

Purnell works hard to sell Lucy as a privileged rich kid whose sunny view of humanity shrivels in the dead heat of the not-so-great outdoors. She’s only just got her bearings when she has a run-in with Walton Goggins as a zombie cowboy with a heart of gold and with Aaron Moten as Maximus, an apprentice knight in the Brotherhood of Steel (aka the Warhammer cosplayers). Later, we are introduced to a jolly, homicidal robot – voiced, somewhat inevitably, by Matt Berry.

With Amazon underwriting the $150 million budget, production values are predictably lavish, the post-apocalyptic monsters agreeably grotesque. The tone won’t be for everyone. As Prime Video has demonstrated with The Boys, violence played for laughs is always an acquired taste.

But if you’ve had enough of the dark and stormy Oppenheimer and would rather look at the bright side of nuclear annihilation, Fallout delivers the perfect payload of OTT action and childish humour. It’s hard to think of another video game adaptation that better conveys the sheer, giddy hedonism of a top-notch shoot ‘em up.

Fallout is available on Prime Video from Thursday 11 April

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