‘Fallout’ Is a Different Nolan Approach to Nuclear War

By any measure, Jonathan Nolan is a successful artist. He created Person of Interest, arguably the last great sci-fi drama hailing from a broadcast network, and followed that up with Westworld, which, at the time, had the most-watched first season of any HBO series. Nolan is no slouch on the film front, either, scoring a Best Original Screenplay nomination for Memento. It’s an undeniably impressive CV, and yet no matter what Nolan accomplishes, he’ll always be under the shadow of his older brother. You’ve probably heard of him:

In terms of achievements within the same field, the Nolans are not unlike the Schumachers: One brother, Michael, is considered one of the greatest drivers in the history of Formula One; the other, Ralf, put together a respectable racing career that included six wins and 27 podiums. Of course, the Nolans have also managed to collaborate on several occasions: In addition to Memento, the brothers have cowritten The Prestige, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, and Interstellar. But it’s now been a decade since the siblings worked together on a project, and despite Nolan’s success in the world of television, he’s currently mired in a slump.

For all the plaudits that Westworld received, including nine Emmy wins from 54 nominations, the series suffered an unprecedented fall from grace. After four seasons with increasingly diminishing returns, HBO didn’t just cancel Westworld: It removed the show from its streaming platform altogether. (These days, you can still find Westworld on free, ad-supported streamers such as Tubi.) By that point, Nolan and Lisa Joy, his wife and creative partner, had a first-look deal in place with Amazon’s Prime Video, which picked up their next sci-fi series, The Peripheral. While Nolan and Joy were only executive producers on the show (rather than creators or showrunners), The Peripheral was their first chance to make an impression at their new streaming home. It didn’t exactly go to plan.

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The Peripheral’s eight-episode first season reportedly cost $175 million, and the series was emblematic of the failure of Prime Video’s excess spending to produce anything even resembling the immense popularity of Game of Thrones, as Jeff Bezos (somewhat unrealistically) craved. And while The Peripheral was originally renewed for a second season amid largely positive reviews, Prime Video retroactively canceled the show during last year’s Hollywood labor strikes. Considering Nolan and Joy’s deal with the streamer is worth $20 million a year, Prime Video was hardly getting a good return on investment. (If any company can afford to throw a bunch of money around, though, it’s Amazon.) But perhaps Nolan and Joy had yet to put their best foot forward.

On Wednesday, Prime Video released the first season of Fallout, the highly anticipated adaptation of the postapocalyptic video game franchise of the same name. (Nolan and Joy are credited as cocreators.) Setting aside Nolan and Joy’s recent stumbles, Fallout couldn’t have arrived at a better time. For years, video game adaptations held a less-than-stellar reputation throughout Hollywood: The best of the bunch were probably Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil movies, and those should be appreciated as thoroughly entertaining schlock. Lately, however, these kinds of projects have taken the industry by storm: The Super Mario Bros. Movie became the second-highest-grossing film of 2023; one of Peacock’s rare success stories is Twisted Metal, which has been renewed for a second season. But the undisputed crown jewel of video game adaptations is HBO’s The Last of Us, the Emmy-winning, postapocalyptic drama that tugged at heartstrings as often as it freaked the hell out of viewers with fungi-related horrors.

The Last of Us is an easy point of comparison for the Fallout series: Both examine what happens to humanity when civilization collapses; both feature zombielike creatures; both are storied franchises with large, built-in fan bases. But that’s where the similarities between these two series end. While The Last of Us is almost punishingly depressing with few moments of levity, Fallout embraces a much wackier tone: As far as sci-fi predecessors go, it feels more of a piece with blockbuster-era Paul Verhoeven. But just because Fallout doesn’t take itself too seriously doesn’t mean it wasn’t a serious undertaking: After whiffing with The Peripheral and the end of Westworld, this is the series where Nolan finally got his mojo back.

Fallout imagines an alternate America in which advances in nuclear technology and the retro, kitschy aesthetics of the Eisenhower era never ended. (As a result, there was no Vietnam War, Watergate scandal, or any other notorious event in the late 21st century embedded in our nation’s history.) By 2077, however, America and China engaged in nuclear war, transforming the planet into an irradiated wasteland. The story then picks up 219 years later by following Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), a young woman who has spent her entire life in a Vault: technologically advanced underground bunkers that house orderly communities until it’s safe to repopulate the surface. After Lucy’s Vault is attacked by a group of raiders who kidnap her father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), she ventures out to the surface in the hope of finding him.

Naturally, Lucy doesn’t know what she’s signed up for. While Vault dwellers follow a familiar code of ethics, it’s every man (or irradiated creature) for himself on the surface. Over the course of Fallout’s eight-episode season, Lucy crosses paths with Maximus (Aaron Moten), a lowly squire for the Brotherhood of Steel—think fascistic, medieval knights with futuristic mech suits—and Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), a former movie star and mutated gunslinger who has roamed the wasteland for centuries. (In the franchise’s parlance, Cooper is known as a ghoul.) Lucy, Maximus, and Cooper share a common goal: They seek to acquire an artifact lodged in a severed head (it’s a long story) that could be the key to saving civilization.

As someone unfamiliar with the games, the highest praise I can give to Fallout regards how accessible it feels. The world-building is fascinating, especially when the show digs into the history of the Vaults and the massive corporation, Vault-Tec, responsible for building them. The wasteland is a Wild West full of terrible surprises: mutated animals ranging from bears to cockroaches to a giant axolotl, opportunistic cannibals, and organ harvesters. The violence, when it does arrive, is cartoonishly over the top, as if every character populating this universe mainlined Quentin Tarantino’s filmography.

But if you look past the ludicrous gore, Fallout isn’t just imagining how humanity would destroy itself: The show is, in its own way, biting the hand that feeds it. Nolan, who directs the first three episodes, opens the series with a scene in which Cooper witnesses nukes razing Los Angeles, which, if nothing else, makes for an interesting companion piece to Christopher Nolan’s Trinity test sequence in Oppenheimer. But while Oppenheimer ends with the existential fear that it might only be a matter of when, not if, our most powerful nations engage in nuclear war, Fallout pins the blame on the insatiable greed of megacorporations. If a company’s entire business model is predicated on selling high-tech fallout shelters, for instance, it’s in their best interest to inflame tensions. As one character puts it, America outsourced the country’s future to the private sector; the results speak for themselves.

Perhaps it’s a bit of a stretch to compare the sinister corporate entities responsible for nuclear annihilation to Amazon, but when one of Fallout’s evil masterminds achieves a twisted form of immortality, it’s easy to connect the dots to the real billionaires aspiring to do the same. (Likewise, the evil corporations in Fallout monopolized their industries with unchecked power, and what’s more Amazon than that?) That deep-rooted cynicism extends to Fallout’s commentary on Hollywood, positing that the industry is trending in a direction where art will be completely subsumed by the demands of commerce. “Forget Hollywood. The future, my friend, is products,” an actor tells Cooper in a flashback. “You’re a product, I’m a product, the end of the world is a product.” Later, when power is restored in the ruins of Los Angeles, the old Hollywood logo lights up—as does the “sponsored by” signage right under it.

In other words, Fallout has a lot on its mind outside of callbacks and Easter eggs for fans of the games. Not all of it works: Maximus and the intricacies of the Brotherhood, in particular, aren’t fleshed out, while some of the show’s attempts at edgy humor fall flat. But on the whole, this is a wacky, wonderfully immersive series that deserves to stick around for the long run. As for Nolan, after his recent stumbles in the realm of science fiction, it’s great to see him stick to the genre with a project that radiates so much confidence.