I mean it, this is by far the best video game adaptation ever. It's actually still very hard to believe that it's as good as it is. It's in my opinion far superior to the overhyped, critically acclaimed TLOU adaptation by HBO (see my review of that show for why).
Our main characters
1. Lucy MacLean: Ella Purnell is an absolute treat, her acting is fantastic and her giant eyes and soft voice fit perfectly with the character she's playing. She looks like a vault-tec bobble head turned into the cutest girl in the best possible way. She's not the stereotypical Disney strong woman trope that everyone is sick and tired off. Instead she is still incredible capable and combat trained but also very femine at the same time. Generally she's not unrealistically strong in combat. She's not throwing around men twice her size with ease, but she can defend herself, is a very good shot and uses her wit, charm and also her "lawful good" personality to survive. Strangely, everyone but Maximus seems to ignore her good looks in the wasteland. When I imagine it's rare to see someone that pretty. It's a breath of fresh air to see a woman as the protagonist be feminine in a show again.
2. The Ghoul AKA Cooper Howard: Mr Goggins delivers absolute gold as always. The ghoul is a relentlessly brutal character who has at the start lost most of his humanity. We later learn his drive to live comes from the fact that he's looking for his family. The acting is incredible as always. The makeup and cgi for his ghoul version look great (maybe a little smooth). Cooper has no chill, he's not just quick to defend himself. But also to kill innocents with no remorse. 200 years in the savage wastelands have turned him into something that isn't a monster but has little humanity left. No sympathy for anyone and a singular drive. To the point where he eats former friends for substanance, kills those offering him a job. And even after Lucy shows him a kindness, "her golden rule" (treat others as you'd want to be treated) and saves him after he tries to sell her to organ harvesters, tortures her and even cuts her finger off. He murders a young boy in cold blood infront of his father and child sister, after he taunts him about having murdered his older brother earlier. Goating the kid into pulling a rifle. When in reality, a rifle bullet seems to literally do nothing to Cooper. Which is kind of a problem, Ghouls in the show have rapid healing abilities and Cooper esp seems to be indistructable. But the rules aren't clear.
3. Maximus: Aaron Moten's Maximus is probably the weakest link. Mainly because his acting feels so inconsistent and at first I couldn't put my finger on it. It's like he's cycling through emotions or facial expressions constantly and it's very distracting. In more emotional scenes this kinda looks unhinged. For example, the interrogation scene he looks like he's about to snap, to a point that I thought it was the point. That he was going to snap and turn into some brotherhood zealot radical and an antagonist. Use everyone around him as a ladder to reach his goals. Instead he's an insecure guy looking for a place to belong and looking to be a hero. To save people. Which is fine. Great even. But his acting just never felt right. And I think I get why that is after having seen some interviews with him. He's very, very feminine in his mannerisms and facial expressions in real life. And in the show his character is trying to act a lot more masculine and straight. But his true self keeps breaking through his acting, the behavior I confused for cycling through emotions was him making his natural facial emotions but then changing them to fit his role more, but not always being able to keep the face straight. He will constantly slightly protrude his upper or lower lip and have this weird stare in certain scenes. One of the worst examples and also one of the worst scenes in the whole show is the scene where Lucy offers to sleep with him. And I think he's supposed to look shocked, a little scared and shy. But instead he comes off like he's a little girl, weirdly pouts his lips and pulls his shoulders together etc. And the dialogue being ridicilously infantile doesn't help "with some guys their penis grows and explodes like a pimple" or something. What? He's an adult man. He lives in barracks with men, women, trans people etc In fact in one scene a guy is clearly mastrubating under the covers. There is NO way in hell a man wrote that line. In fact, right after writing that I checked the writer for the episode. And it's a lady called Karey Dornetto. They really need to stop this nonsense where they have every episode written by a different writer. It makes the show/story feel super inconsistent.
The writing
It's really good at many parts.. For example a lot of the comedic bits and humor were great. Some of the lines are fantastic. But it's also horrifically bad at other times. And I mean beyond how weird it is that Lucy would casually asks Maximus to sleep with her in a room with a giant window, in a strange place, surrounded by strange people. I thought it was funny she was asking about sperm count etc in the vault. But that made sense. Just randomly inviting people to have sex with no protection etc in that weird condition? Was that supposed to be empowering or something? Or just a set up for the pimple penis joke or Maximus later asking if she'd like to "explode his D now." Beyond all that, the motivations for NONE of the antagonists make any sense
1. The corporations: Vault-tec wants to wipe out all the competition, on a larger scale. Wipe out literaly every faction, country, group, political entity and organization so there won't be anyone to fight or compete anymore. Total domination by one group, one faction: Vault-Tec. How? By a nuclear holocaust. By dropping the bombs themselves. But that's just part of the plan. They know it won't wipe out everyone. Their plan is to, wait for it..... Wait it out.. their plan is that everyone on the surface eventually dies. How? Time. But .. that makes no sense? They'd multiply and start rebuilding naturally, right? Nope.. don't think about it. "The greatest weapon of mass destruction is time" according to vault-tec in this show. But it gets better. Vault-Tec then invites all their competitors.. to join in on the fun. Because obviously the best way to end competition. Is to tell your competition of your plans an invite them to join you in the new future you're planning to create. But wasn't the point .. that there'd be no more factio- SHHHH, DON'T THINK ABOUT IT! Oh and the vault experiments.. well those are now made up by different corporations for their own end goals, that they are allowed to choose for some reason. In the game lore it's the enclave who was convinced the nuclear war would was inevitable and would make the world uninhabitable, so they planned to create multi generation star ships and colonize different planets. Most of the vaults were meant as experiments to see how people would last in long term confinement and or to create some super human species etc etc and a small amount of them were control groups and thus had no experiments etc going on.
Listen, I'm fine with the corpos dropping the bomb, even though it ruins the ambigiouty we had about who dropped them. I don't mind vault tec's somewhat cartoony power hunger and motivations. That's totally fine in fallout. But the bad writing, the plotholes, the inconsistency .. that's unacceptable. These people are supposed to be professional writers, and they couldn't come up with something better? OR just stuck to the game lore? Same for characters, it's ok for them to be whacky and over the top. It's fallout. But there is a limit to what works and what is just infantile and dumb.
2. Lucy's parents: So Lucy's dad is a lower level cog in the Vault-Tec machine and he's assigned to live his life out in a vault, herding the flock. All the Vault 31 people are cryopod people from before the bomb. This doesn't seem enough of a revelation for vault 32 to break out into a full on civil war and massacre each other. But that does seem to be the extent of it.
Moldaver's talk about Lucy's mom Rose was cringe worthy. Oh, how smart and mary sue she was. She inferred from the vault losing water, that it was being siphoned. She didn't assume it was a leak or anything. No it had to be that civilization had restarted and their water was being siphoned by them. How did they siphon the .. water of a vault? Wouldn't that be a design fla-- don't think about it! You're not supposed to think! Look, I'm not looking for much logic, but, what? And then when she tells her husband, and he says .. probably just a leak. She figures he's must be hiding something? In a vault full of people that are bred to be docile and nice to each other? She has no idea what's there. It might be a leak, it might be a bunch of monsters or raiders, the radiation is still there etc etc. What does she do? She takes her children and .. leaves the vault. She takes her children to an irradiated wasteland to live in an irradiated town among mutants, raiders, murderers, and under constant threat of monsters, other factions, radiation etc It's implied she has a romantic relationship with Moldaver and that Shadysands was this super great, perfect place where civilization had thrived etc. What? I mean sure there was more safety than other places and the NCR was in power etc. But it was still the fallout world with raiders and tons of hostile factions, cannibals, ghouls, monsters, radiation in every part of the world etc.
The father than, get this. Goes and takes the children. And then. He NUKES the town. How does a mid level management tool from a corpo nuke a whole town you ask? Don't. Because we're never told. He just does.
There is much more, but it appears we've run out of the characer limit. Overall, I really enjoyed the show. But it could have been so much better.
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