Amazon just dropped a brand new trailer for its upcoming Fallout TV series, which now arrives on Prime Video on April 11. If you thought December’s teaser trailer was good, then this new one might just blow you away. After being burned so many times by long-gestating video game adaptations, I am stunned at just how good this show looks.
It’s still a little early to make a final judgment on "Fallout," but if the writing is as good as the footage in this trailer then we’re in for a treat. I just hope that the final thing is more like "The Last of Us" and less like "Halo" — because I will never get over just how badly the showrunners botched that series.
The first thing I have to get off my chest? How excited I am to hear Matt Berry’s voice come out of a Mister Handy. Matt Berry is fantastic and should be in everything, and there’s no one better to voice those often-defective floating robots than him. Assuming you’re not bringing back Stephen Russel anyway.
But to be totally honest, the rest of the show looks fantastic. We’ve got mutants galore, the Brotherhood of Steel, power armor and plenty of footage of Dogmeat in action. Plus there’s the stark contrast between the happy-go-lucky retro-futuristic atmosphere in Vault 33 and the brutal reality of the world outside where everyone and everything is trying to kill you.
I’m still not completely sold on Walter Goggins’ ghoul makeup. It seems a little too smooth compared to the Ghoul models in recent "Fallout" games, but I think I can live with that. Especially since it looks like they built some actual sets to recreate the world of the games, rather than building them in obvious-looking TV budget CGI.
Prestige TV has a source material problem
Really it feels as though the people behind this show, including "Westworld’s" Jonathan Nolan, actually care about making this series faithful to the source material. Something that a lot of prestige TV seems to have trouble with at times.
It’s almost as though the creatives behind some of the less faithful shows, like "The Witcher" and "Halo," have been going out of their way to ignore the established source material. Whether it’s killing off fan-favorite characters, deviating from established plots, or straight-up being disrespectful of established tradition.
Yes, I’m talking about Master Chief taking off his helmet and flashing his face around on Paramount Plus for everyone to see. The show even took a step further in "Halo" season 2 by separating Chief and the rest of the Spartans from their armor for multiple episodes.
And don’t even get me started about glossing over the fall of Reach in a single episode. I don't have the mental energy to discuss that in great detail, considering how much I loved the book.
I’ve been a huge fan of the "Halo" franchise for almost two decades at this point, having played the games, read the books and spent an exorbitant amount of money on "Halo"-themed Xbox consoles. I was so excited when they announced that the perpetually struggling movie adaptation would be a TV show, and the fact that the show is so incredibly bad is absolutely heartbreaking.
If there was a recording of me watching "Halo" the show you wouldn’t see my great visible break, like Ralph Wiggum’s, but you would see me loudly cursing and gesticulating at the screen like my dad watching Everton lose again.
It’s a good thing I have very low blood pressure because the ridiculous choices this darn TV show has made would be sending it through the roof. I honestly feel like the only reason I still watch it is so that I know exactly what to criticize. Maybe I should stop doing that, but there’s so much atrocious stuff going on that I can’t really discuss because it would be diving very deep into spoiler territory.
"Halo" has done a pretty good job of replicating armor and weapons from the game, I’ll give it that much. But it’s just about the only nice thing I have to say about the show.
'Fallout' doesn’t need to adapt an existing story
It might help that Prime Video’s "Fallout" is creating its own story in the "Fallout" universe, rather than adapting an existing game. You just need to get the broad strokes of the universe correct and stick to the established lore you can get a pretty good original story out of it.
Just look at the Bill & Frank episode of "The Last of Us." The story was completely different from the one in the game, but it was able to tell a fantastic mini-story in the middle of a larger story. Plus it helped that it didn’t really contradict anything and mess with Joel and Ellie's story compared to the game.
Will long-time fans be happy about everything in Fallout? Probably not. It’s hard to please everyone, and fans of classic "Fallout" games have been very vocal about things they don’t like since the franchise was bought out by Bethesda. But even they seem to be able to admit when something is good, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find someone with a bad thing to say about "Fallout New Vegas."
Of course, we haven’t seen "Fallout" the show yet, and we could end up with eight episodes of hot garbage. That garbage may look incredible and feature some fantastic casting, but that wouldn’t change the fact that it is still garbage — like David Lynch’s "Dune." I hope it doesn’t end up that way, if only so Kyle MacLachlan doesn’t end up with two of those stains on his resume. But we do have to remember that a trailer isn’t the final product.
Even if "Fallout" isn’t as good as "The Last of Us," it just needs to be better than "Halo." The latter has set a pretty low bar for these types of shows to beat. Not only is it wilfully ignorant of its source material, but it’s also just not a good show. You don’t have to be a "Halo" fan to see that.
All eight episodes of "Fallout’s" first season will arrive on Amazon's Prime Video on April 11 — a day earlier than we were originally told. So we don’t have too long to wait and see just how good, or disappointing, this show actually is.
